Re: jfsutils: development status and license

On 08/03/2015 04:42 AM, Daniel Cegiełka wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> It seems that jfsutils is not actively developed. The last version was
> published in 2011. Is this package will be further developed?

Not really. I've made a few fixes in cvs since then, but never got
around to creating a new release. I probably should.

> I also have two questions relating to license.
> 
> I want to build support for JFS in lua language. This will allow to
> interactively work at a low level with JFS (eg. better debugging and
> testing). The problem is that lua is released under the MIT license,
> and jfsutils under the GPL. Is it possible to write such tool without
> breaking the GPL. I'm afraid that GPL will in this case too
> restrictive.

I'm not a lawyer, but I would assume as long as you didn't copy code
from jfsutils, you should be able to do that.

> I would also build basic support for JFS (mkfs.jsf and fsck.jfs) in
> the toybox (http://www.landley.net/toybox/). I am afraid that such
> support for JFS can be very difficult to implement, because toybox is
> published under the BSD license. Is it necessary to rewrite the whole
> JFS functionality from scratch, so as not to violate the GPL?

I haven't worked on BSD projects, so I'm no expert, but I believe
putting GPL code into a BSD product is not feasible.

> Is it possible to publish jfsutils on a more liberal license (MIT,
> BSD)? Currently, JFS can not compete with XFS, and without good
> support for this filesystem JFS will become increasingly marginalized.

A similar request was made several years ago and IBM decided against it
then. Since IBM released the code under GPLv2, they'd be the only ones
that could release it under a different license, and I no longer work
for them. I don't think they care much about JFS on Linux anymore, but
it's still their enterprise filesystem on AIX, so I assume they somewhat
care about the intellectual property rights.

> 
> Best regards,
> Daniel
> 

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