[Jfs-discussion] jfsutils: development status and license

[Daniel C. <dan...@gm...>]

Hi,

It seems that jfsutils is not actively developed. The last version was
published in 2011. Is this package will be further developed?

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 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?

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.

Best regards,
Daniel