Lustre File System Getting New Community Distro 68
darthcamaro writes "Oracle acquired a lot of open source tech from Sun that has since been forked — or is in the process of being forked. The open source Lustre high performance computing file system isn't on the list of forked projects, but it is getting a new, community-driven distro that is trying really hard to say that they're not officially a fork. 'Since April of 2010 there has been confusion in the community, and we've seen an impact in the business confidence in Lustre,' Brent Gorda, CEO and president of Whamcloud told InternetNews.com. 'The community has been asking for leadership, the commitment of a for-profit entity that they can rely on for support and a path forward for the technology.'"
What is Lustre File System (Score:5, Informative)
From their website:
http://wiki.lustre.org/index.php/Main_Page [lustre.org]
High Performance and Scalability
For the world's largest and most complex computing environments, the Lustre file system redefines high performance, scaling to tens of thousands of nodes and petabytes of storage with groundbreaking I/O and metadata throughput.
Ended project (Score:5, Informative)
According to insidehpc [insidehpc.com], Oracle has stopped developing Lustre and developers "have reportedly been encouraged to apply for other positions within the company".
A group of Lustre users already created OpenSFS [opensfs.org] on October 2010 to continue developing Lustre.
Re:Very first thing to do is... (Score:5, Informative)
ZFS is a big fat patent trap
Oracle has released the ZFS code under the CDDL. While lots of Linux people hate the license, it has very strong patent retaliation clauses. Oracle explicitly grates you patent licenses for everything required to use ZFS via clause 2.1. All other contributors do via clause 2.2. Anyone exerting patents against ZFS immediately (well, within 60 days) loses this grant and has their (copyright) license terminated as well via clause 6.2.
Since Sun accepted third-party contributions to ZFS under the OpenSolaris program, if Oracle tried exerting patents against any ZFS distributor then they would immediately have to stop distributing Solaris and then remove all of these contributions before they could start again.
The ZFS patents are only an issue for a reimplementation of ZFS for Linux, and that's a problem caused by the GPL. Using the FreeBSD or NetBSD ports of ZFS (or even the FUSE port) gives you an explicit grant to the patents.