So last time I asked someone about this they said that something about patents prevents ZFS from having the ability to implement any form of defragmentation, will that ever change? Did I misunderstand things? If that happens, will it be open-source?
The patent expires in 2025 I believe.
So what process got patented exactly? Cause I would imagine moving data around the physical space of a hard drive to be something very generic.
Hmmm. Is there no other way of doing this? I know that any professional application already has a licensed application of this method, but couldn't there be something else? The file system must know where all the parts of a file are on a drive, couldn't we scan those to see which files are in not adjacent locations? Afterwards we can move things, get the file system updated, and then move the next file.
I don't know. I'm just rambling since I know next to nothing about file systems. Basically, can't there be another method that's developed in the open source community to bypass this? It should be a lot of help given how much ZFS is being used. Although, what is it that BTRFS uses for defrag without violating this patent?
The options are as follows:
They can license the patent
They can create a better technique and if they are smart, patent their new idea.