More TensComplement stuff
xbytor
I'm so fond of zfs to begin with. It is not clear to me what
responsibility TC has for releasing source code for any of their
product. If it was GPL/BSD/Apache then the matter would be a bit more
clear; that's where I work and what I understand. My concern is that
if I buy in and upgrade all of my pools to get all of the cool new
features, what happens if TC goes Tango-Uniform. I would feel much
more comfortable if TC would put all of their base code (i.e. command
line tools, kext stuff) into a code escrow so that if the company did
fail the sources would be kicked out to the MacZFS community. Back
when I worked corporate this sort of arrangement was not uncommon and
gave us some sense of security with smaller vendors.
Also, the way they have been marketing their product has me concerned.
I can see two tiers: one with pretty GUI and one with all the raw
command line tools (which maybe has the GUI stuff). Anything else is
artificial market $egmentation with no technical justification. At
least they apparently got rid of the pool/disk size restrictions.
Sorry for the rant, but I'm intoxicated and doing some ZFS gymnastics
because ZFS doesn't have that convenient TimeMachine feature 'Delete
All Backups of "Foo.bar"'. (I had a large slug of VMWare images that
were ignored when I was rsyncing for backups but got pulled in when I
move to "zfs send | zfs receive").
Robar Philip
Also note that, amazingly enough, ZEVO doesn’t “fully” support AFP file sharing on Lion.
Phil
Daniel Bethe
> responsibility TC has for releasing source code for any of their
> product. If it was GPL/BSD/Apache then the matter would be a bit more
The closest thing they have to license terms, is listed in the EULA. A gentleman on IRC pointed that out to me the other day. He also pasted the relevant text, because their web site was totally down. It had an error from its hosting company, that their traffic quota was exceeded. So I didn't read the whole thing. But I did email them a request for the source code to cd...@tenscomplement.com. That was a few days ago, and I haven't heard anything yet.
The gentleman in IRC pasted an email that he'd exchanged with Don Brady, during the beta testing period, whereupon Don promised to eventually release the "core" code. That, plus the phone conversation that I had with Don whereupon he declared Tens Complement to be an "open source company", and their membership in the ZFS working group, leaves me open to fair hope.
This is all I can find about the ZFS working group: http://sparcv9.blogspot.com/2011/06/zfs-working-group.html ITS A SECRET TO EVERYBODY ^_^
Kinda c r e e p y .
But a lot of Apple's culture, in which Don spent perhaps most of his career, appears to be likewise from the outside. Just look at Final Cut Pro X. Geez, what a beautiful disaster. It started out as one of the most colossally boneheadedly spectacular love/hate software launch failures that I've ever heard of. Then, it steadily opened up and it allowed the rest of the world to take care of its business via XML, and its most recent updates fix almost all problems. Inside, almost everyone had the best talent and intentions the whole time. But the absolutely worst problem it ever had, by infinitely far, is the total opacity with a lack of communication and empathy with the public.
It just forces everyone to make a lot of guesses it causes many people a lot of anxiety. Most people don't handle anxiety well, and they freak out and jump ship for absolutely no reason, and come up with outlandish responses. For many, it's like a vindictive response, an anxiety binder, to retalliate against the unknown. They'll talk about stuffing another ZFS implementation inside a third-party *proprietary* virtual machine, and create a convoluted supermassive boot-time dependency under someone else's lock and key, as if their existing free solution had magically stopped working. Patience is a virtue, but it's just plain bad from both sides.
Of course I've also known people with a legitimate need for deduplication and I salute their ingenius use of virtual machines and devotion to Mac OS ;-)
> features, what happens if TC goes Tango-Uniform. I would feel much
> more comfortable if TC would put all of their base code (i.e. command
> line tools, kext stuff) into a code escrow so that if the company did
That's a good point, in general. One traditional free/nonfree hybrid corporate model is to withhold source code for a time so as to monetize the product more, release the source code on regular intervals, and have a source code escrow underlying it all.
I would hope that Codeweavers has such a thing, but I think they're so radically progressive that they just go right ahead and publicly commit the source code of the core WINE product. The WINE public tree is about a year more advanced that their own proprietary commercial product, with Codeweavers acting as its primary corporate contributor! And they do so, in the face of at least one other competitor who has historically ripped off their contributions years ago and refused to reciprocate since. I read all the time (sometimes even in their corporate IRC channel, where their own employees dwell) that people are urged to use the free product rather than the proprietary one -- if they know how. For us hackers, their product symbolizes a tipjar for the development of free software. Model citizens of the corporate free software community, those Codeweavers. As far as I know. Also see the publicly traded billion-dollar Red Hat.
> command line tools (which maybe has the GUI stuff). Anything else is
> artificial market $egmentation with no technical justification. At
> least they apparently got rid of the pool/disk size restrictions.
Yeah. Artificial market segmentation which includes someone *else's* free software that was completely invented and donated, creating a self-contained ecosystem which enables these new startups to exist at all. On which is in a market that's already saturated by said free software in the first place. ;) So that's why we can hope for especially generous license compliance, in hopefully short time. They're friendly and community-minded people who deserve some slack, who are already compelled by the law and by the free market.
Obviously, TC has been outside of legal compliance with the CDDL since the first beta, but it's traditional to cut companies some slack on time to comply.
From Section 3.1 of http://www.opensource.org/licenses/CDDL-1.0
"Any Covered Software that You distribute or otherwise make available in Executable form must also be made available in Source Code form and that Source Code form must be distributed only under the terms of this License. You must include a copy of this License with every copy of the Source Code form of the Covered Software You distribute or otherwise make available. You must inform recipients of any such Covered Software in Executable form as to how they can obtain such Covered Software in Source Code form in a reasonable manner on or through a medium customarily used for software exchange."
But hey! They finally acknowledge our existence on their web site! Check the FAQ! <3 We can also keep in mind the fact that TC's launch will draw more google hits to our site, and to our conversations. For some Google keywords, the first page of results is just them and us (including the mailing list).
Good luck with your backups!
Daniel Bethe
> Also note that, amazingly enough, ZEVO doesn’t “fully” support AFP file sharing
> on Lion.
Yeah that's probably not the highest priority at the moment, although probably fairly high. I can't get netatalk to work at all on Mac OS 10.7, because of Mac OS 10.7's security features. It's a widely known problem that I don't understand.
>:-[
Richard Elling
responsibility TC has for releasing source code for any of theirproduct. If it was GPL/BSD/Apache then the matter would be a bit more
The closest thing they have to license terms, is listed in the EULA. A gentleman on IRC pointed that out to me the other day. He also pasted the relevant text, because their web site was totally down. It had an error from its hosting company, that their traffic quota was exceeded. So I didn't read the whole thing. But I did email them a request for the source code to cd...@tenscomplement.com. That was a few days ago, and I haven't heard anything yet.
The gentleman in IRC pasted an email that he'd exchanged with Don Brady, during the beta testing period, whereupon Don promised to eventually release the "core" code. That, plus the phone conversation that I had with Don whereupon he declared Tens Complement to be an "open source company", and their membership in the ZFS working group, leaves me open to fair hope.
This is all I can find about the ZFS working group: http://sparcv9.blogspot.com/2011/06/zfs-working-group.html ITS A SECRET TO EVERYBODY ^_^
Kinda c r e e p y .
But a lot of Apple's culture, in which Don spent perhaps most of his career, appears to be likewise from the outside. Just look at Final Cut Pro X. Geez, what a beautiful disaster. It started out as one of the most colossally boneheadedly spectacular love/hate software launch failures that I've ever heard of. Then, it steadily opened up and it allowed the rest of the world to take care of its business via XML, and its most recent updates fix almost all problems. Inside, almost everyone had the best talent and intentions the whole time. But the absolutely worst problem it ever had, by infinitely far, is the total opacity with a lack of communication and empathy with the public.
It just forces everyone to make a lot of guesses it causes many people a lot of anxiety. Most people don't handle anxiety well, and they freak out and jump ship for absolutely no reason, and come up with outlandish responses. For many, it's like a vindictive response, an anxiety binder, to retalliate against the unknown. They'll talk about stuffing another ZFS implementation inside a third-party *proprietary* virtual machine, and create a convoluted supermassive boot-time dependency under someone else's lock and key, as if their existing free solution had magically stopped working. Patience is a virtue, but it's just plain bad from both sides.
Of course I've also known people with a legitimate need for deduplication and I salute their ingenius use of virtual machines and devotion to Mac OS ;-)
features, what happens if TC goes Tango-Uniform. I would feel muchmore comfortable if TC would put all of their base code (i.e. commandline tools, kext stuff) into a code escrow so that if the company did
That's a good point, in general. One traditional free/nonfree hybrid corporate model is to withhold source code for a time so as to monetize the product more, release the source code on regular intervals, and have a source code escrow underlying it all.
I would hope that Codeweavers has such a thing, but I think they're so radically progressive that they just go right ahead and publicly commit the source code of the core WINE product. The WINE public tree is about a year more advanced that their own proprietary commercial product, with Codeweavers acting as its primary corporate contributor! And they do so, in the face of at least one other competitor who has historically ripped off their contributions years ago and refused to reciprocate since. I read all the time (sometimes even in their corporate IRC channel, where their own employees dwell) that people are urged to use the free product rather than the proprietary one -- if they know how. For us hackers, their product symbolizes a tipjar for the development of free software. Model citizens of the corporate free software community, those Codeweavers. As far as I know. Also see the publicly traded billion-dollar Red Hat.command line tools (which maybe has the GUI stuff). Anything else isartificial market $egmentation with no technical justification. Atleast they apparently got rid of the pool/disk size restrictions.
Yeah. Artificial market segmentation which includes someone *else's* free software that was completely invented and donated, creating a self-contained ecosystem which enables these new startups to exist at all. On which is in a market that's already saturated by said free software in the first place. ;) So that's why we can hope for especially generous license compliance, in hopefully short time. They're friendly and community-minded people who deserve some slack, who are already compelled by the law and by the free market.
Obviously, TC has been outside of legal compliance with the CDDL since the first beta, but it's traditional to cut companies some slack on time to comply.
From Section 3.1 of http://www.opensource.org/licenses/CDDL-1.0
"Any Covered Software that You distribute or otherwise make available in Executable form must also be made available in Source Code form and that Source Code form must be distributed only under the terms of this License. You must include a copy of this License with every copy of the Source Code form of the Covered Software You distribute or otherwise make available. You must inform recipients of any such Covered Software in Executable form as to how they can obtain such Covered Software in Source Code form in a reasonable manner on or through a medium customarily used for software exchange."
But hey! They finally acknowledge our existence on their web site! Check the FAQ! <3 We can also keep in mind the fact that TC's launch will draw more google hits to our site, and to our conversations. For some Google keywords, the first page of results is just them and us (including the mailing list).
Good luck with your backups!
ylluminate
for a long while.
-George
X Bytor
Also note that, amazingly enough, ZEVO doesn’t “fully” support AFP file sharing on Lion.
I just/finally updated to 10.7.3 this week and found out that it's not exporting my ZFS pools via SMB (to my Win7 boxes).
That's not helping my mood either. Swapping in the Snow Leopard AppleFileServer.app trick didn't work but I can always
download MacPorts samba or something.
Good luck with your backups!
of Time Machine.
And thanks for the CDDL info. Things are maybe not quite as worrisome as they sometimes appear to be.
Daniel Bethe
>I just/finally updated to 10.7.3 this week
Well, don't do that!
>And thanks for the CDDL info. Things are maybe not quite as worrisome as they sometimes appear to be.
Yeah, I mean that's why Apple released the minimal source code for 10a286! Although I guess that was only after being pursued. ;) I'm sure they have a nontrivial legal sanitization process for all source code releases.