Skip to contentSkip to conversation

Leaving Oracle

DISCUSSION Chris Mason 4 participants 4 messages Jun 7, 2012 – Jun 13, 2012

Subsystems (2)
lore
Share & tools
lore
#0 lore raw

Hello everyone,

Oracle has been a fantastic place to work, and I really appreciate their support for my projects. But, I've decided to take a new position at Fusion-io. I will start the new job on Monday, June 11.

Quoted 1 line

From a Btrfs point of view, very little will change. I'll still

maintain Btrfs and will continue all of my Btrfs development in the open. Oracle will still use Btrfs in their Oracle Linux products, and I'll work with all of the distros using Btrfs in production.

Fusion-io really believes in open source, and I'm excited to help them shape the future of high performance storage.

[email protected] will probably stop working this Friday June 8th. [email protected] will be my new email address.

Just let me know if you have any questions.

-chris

#1 lore raw
Quoted 3 lines · Chris Mason

Oracle has been a fantastic place to work, and I really appreciate their support for my projects. But, I've decided to take a new position at Fusion-io. I will start the new job on Monday, June 11.

Congratulations! I hope it's fruitful and enjoyable for you.

Quoted 4 lines

From a Btrfs point of view, very little will change. I'll still maintain Btrfs and will continue all of my Btrfs development in the open. Oracle will still use Btrfs in their Oracle Linux products, and I'll work with all of the distros using Btrfs in production.

This is also a relief. :)

Quoted 7 lines

Fusion-io really believes in open source, and I'm excited to help them shape the future of high performance storage.

[email protected] will probably stop working this Friday June 8th. [email protected] will be my new email address.

Just let me know if you have any questions.

Hugo.

Signature · 3 lines
=== Hugo Mills: hugo@... carfax.org.uk | darksatanic.net | lug.org.uk ===
  PGP key: 515C238D from wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net or http://www.carfax.org.uk
    --- Don't worry, he's not drunk. He's like that all the time. ---    
#2 lore raw
In reply to Chris Mason
Quoted 5 lines · Chris Mason

Hello everyone,

Oracle has been a fantastic place to work, and I really appreciate their support for my projects. But, I've decided to take a new position at Fusion-io. I will start the new job on Monday, June 11.

Congratulations.

Quoted 2 lines

Fusion-io really believes in open source, and I'm excited to help them shape the future of high performance storage.

Are you sure about that?

I installed one of their IO Drive SSD cards in one of my employer's servers, and while the driver source code was supplied, the licence was definitely not open source. (See http://www.fusionio.com/legal/eula/)

Quoted 1 line

4.1 General Restrictions. [...] you will not, and will not permit or authorize third parties to: (a) reproduce, modify, translate, enhance, decompile, disassemble, reverse engineer, or create derivative works of the Software;

#3 lore raw
Quoted 7 lines · David Pottage
Quoted 5 lines · Chris Mason

Hello everyone,

Oracle has been a fantastic place to work, and I really appreciate their support for my projects. But, I've decided to take a new position at Fusion-io. I will start the new job on Monday, June 11.

Congratulations.

Quoted 13 lines
Quoted 2 lines

Fusion-io really believes in open source, and I'm excited to help them shape the future of high performance storage.

Are you sure about that?

I installed one of their IO Drive SSD cards in one of my employer's servers, and while the driver source code was supplied, the licence was definitely not open source. (See http://www.fusionio.com/legal/eula/)

Quoted 4 lines

4.1 General Restrictions. [...] you will not, and will not
permit or authorize third parties to: (a) reproduce, modify, translate, enhance, decompile, disassemble, reverse engineer, or create derivative works of the Software;

Hi everyone,

Circling back around to this, now that I'm up and running again.

Most of your storage is hidden behind some kind of closed source firmware. With Fusion-io, you get a closed driver, and that has its own long standing debates that won't get resolved here.

Fusion-io has a strong track record of contributing to Linux, and I'm sure we'll keep hiring more developers that are well known in the community.

Of course, Btrfs is a GPL project, and all the future work in Btrfs is going to stay GPL.

The great thing about Fusion-io is they are very actively trying to engage higher parts of the storage stack to take advantage of the hardware. Since these features need to be in upstream filesystems, we'll have to hammer out nice generic apis to take advantage of them.

(This is my favorite kind of we that really means Jens Axboe)

Anyone who wants to support a backend for the apis is welcome to do so, and I'm sure they will change over time as we all figure out what works best.

Long story short, yes, I am sure that Fusion-io cares about open source. Oracle too, since a few people misread that line as a dig at Oracle.

-chris