• Configurable Zstd Compression Level Support Is Revived For Btrfs

  Since the Linux 4.14 kernel Btrfs has supported Zstd for transparent file-system compression while a revived patch-set would allow that Zstd compression level to become configurable by the end-user.

  Facebook, which is behind Zstandard and also the employer for several key Btrfs developers, started off on the Zstd compression level support for Btrfs previously. This would allow users to use a higher compression level to achieve greater compression but at the cost of increased memory usage and obviously more resource intensive or opt for lower compression.

• VMware GPL case is back in court—will we finally get some clarity on the meaning of "derivative work"?

  One of the most active Linux kernel developers, Christoph Hellwig, backed by the Software Freedom Conservancy, (unsurprisingly perhaps) has struck again against a virtualisation giant—VMware. for breaching the GNU General Public Licence (GPL). More than two years after the Hamburg District Court’s dismissal, an appeal has been filed in the German Court of Appeal. This case has attracted a worldwide attention because the claims raised call for court’s interpretation of the scope of the GPL applicability and, in particular, the reach of its copyleft effect.

  [...]

  The notion of a derivative work in a GPL context has been a big unknown for nearly two decades. Such uncertainty and potential risk of having to open-source proprietary code has led many commercial entities and open source projects to refrain from including a GPL’ed software in their codebase. 

  Hellwig v VMware might become a gamechanger, if it provides for the first time much-anticipated judicial clarity as to what implications software architecture has for licence interpretation and how copyright law fits in. That said, given the wide diversity of the structure of software is built and how it is distributed any decision in this case will not likely be the last word.

• Google v. Oracle – Supreme Court Petition

  After reading the Federal Circuit decision, I wrote that the case is “likely heading to the Supreme Court.”  Although I believe that the case has a very good shot – one difficulty is that it involves a decision by the Federal Circuit applying Ninth Circuit law — it effectively holds no weight and can be simply rejected by the next Ninth Circuit panel addressing the same issues.

• Red Hat Drops MongoDB Over License

  MongoDB's attempts to make some money from its NoSQL database have hit another snag as Red Hat has now dropped it from its Enterprise Linux distribution.

  This is the latest in a sequence of moves and countermoves that started when MongoDB changed its license terms to use a Server Side Public License (SSPL) that explicitly says that if a company wanted to reuse and rebadge its database, explicitly to offer MongoDB as a service, then that company either needs to buy a commercial license or to open source the service.

• Why more may be the wrong measure of open source contributions

• Battle Of The Document Databases

  Cloud providers can be like sharks in that they have to keep moving forward – in their case, growing the number of services they can offer enterprises – or be overtaken by competitors.

  That need to continually grow the service portfolio isn’t going to go away any time soon. Cloud adoption is accelerating, moving past the early adopter stage and into what Paul Teich, principal analyst with Liftr Cloud Insights and a contributor here at The Next Platform, calls the “early majority” phase, and enterprises are moving forward with strategies that involve leveraging more than one public cloud provider.

  At the same time, the pile of data being generated by organizations is growing rapidly – and the cloud is becoming the place to collect, store, process, and analyze much of that data – but only a portion of enterprise workloads – about 20 percent – are being run in the cloud. That means that four out of five are still run in on-premises environments, so there is still a lot of applications that need to make their way from behind the firewall and into the cloud.

• What Does Open Source Mean in the Era of Cloud APIs?

  One of the most interesting and unsurprising characteristics of conversations with organizations that have adopted one of the emerging hybrid or “non-compete” style of licenses is that they are universally insistent on being differentiated from one another. Which is understandable on the one hand, given that there are major structural differences between the Commons Clause and the SSPL, to pick two recent examples. Whether it’s reasonable to expect a market which by and large has little appetite for the nuances of different licensing approaches to care is, of course, a separate question.

  What is perhaps more interesting, however, is a central, foundational assumption that every member of this category of licenses shares. On the surface, examples like the Business Source License, the Cockroach Community License, the Commons Clause, the Confluent Community License, the Fair Source License, the TimeScale license or the SSPL would seem to have little in common. Some have ambitions to be considered open source, some do not but invoke open source-like terminology, and some are unambiguously and unapologetically proprietary. Some merely require contributions back copyleft-style, some prohibit usage within prescribed business models (read: cloud) and others restrict business usage without distinction. And so on; while typically rolled up and discussed as a category, they are no more unified in their intent and purpose than open source licenses broadly.

Last week I reported on ZFS On Linux breaking with Linux 5.0 due to some kernel symbols sought by this out-of-tree file-system driver no longer being exported and the upstream developers not willing to adjust for the ZoL code. That's still the case but the ZFS On Linux developers have a patch so at least the file-system driver will be able to build on Linux 5.0.

This ZOL + Linux 5.0 issue stems from a set of functions used by this ZFS Linux port for vectorized file-system checksums no longer being exported. The kernel developers don't want to re-export the functionality since as Greg Kroah-Hartman put it, "my tolerance for ZFS is pretty non-existant."

Since that Phoronix article last week, Greg KH followed up on the mailing list with, "Sorry, no, we do not keep symbols exported for no in-kernel users." Longtime Linux kernel developer Christoph Hellwig also suggested users switch instead to FreeBSD if caring about ZFS.

Back in October, MongoDB announced the Server Side Public License v1 (SSPLv1) as their new license moving forward for this document-oriented database server over their existing AGPL code. SSPL was met with much controversy upon its unveiling and Fedora's legal team has now ruled it an invalid free software license for packaged software in its repositories.

The intent of MongoDB developing the Server Side Public License was to ensure that public cloud vendors and other companies using their software as a service are giving back to the community / the upstream project. SSPL v1 was based on the GPLv3 but lays clear that a company publicly offering the SSPL-licensed software as a service must in turn open-source their software that it uses to offer said service. That stipulation applies only to organizations making use of MongoDB for public software services.