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Martin Fink — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:23:00 GMT

If you didn’t catch the press a little while back, HP announced the contribution of the AdvFS source code base to the open source community. A lot of times I get asked "why doesn’t HP open source software XYZ". The reality is that open sourcing stuff is really hard. In many cases we have third party licenses that won’t allow us to do that. In other cases, the code is structured or documented in such a way that would make it very hard to release in an atomic way. And in other cases, we just don’t think we can build a community so it doesn’t make sense. In this case, a few smart people in HP saw a huge opportunity. We had a code base that HP wasn’t going to use. We owned all the code and the IP. We did the work to make sure there wasn’t anything in there we couldn’t release. Finally, the need for IP in the open source community that would help deliver a robust, mission critical file system was there. While it would be possible for someone to do a port of AdvFS to Linux directly, that wasn’t really our intent. We wanted to share "tricks of the trade", and also release a huge amount of prior art. In the end, we hope this accelerates the delivery of a new, modern and mission critical file system for Linux. I know I’ll be impressed with what the community delivers. I can’t help but to comment on the fact that we released the code under the GPLv2. We didn’t create a new license, and we made sure we were Linux compatible. Take a hint Jonathan….

Mission Critical Computing Blog : AdvFS Linux servers

Contributions