A commotion has broken out on the ZFS mailing list; once again, someonehas announced an open-source project to port the CDDL-licensed ZFS codeto the Linux kernel, turning it into a kernel module. Predictably, anumber of people are pointing out that this mixing of the CDDL and theGPLv2 is (probably) not legally viable, and equally predictably otherpeople are both saying that it is and putting forth ways around theproblem. But all the legal argument is missing the point; regardless of

It's become common for bloggers to announce their new entries byposting little announcements to places like Twitter and Facebook;the ultimate version of this is the Planet Sysadmin twitter feed . Even beyond how common this is, myvague Referer-watching here on WanderingThoughts suggests that readersactually use this.

(Although a certain amount of the hits are from robots; for some reason,harvesting URLs from Twitter streams seems popular.)

In fact, anecdotally a fair number of people have switched from feedreaders to finding out about

Every so often, I run across surprising omissions in the Unix toolchestof small utilities and the like. Today's is a program to print some orall of the various passwd fields for a user, by extended analogy to id (which will print user and group information in useful ways); youwould use it to extract data like the shell or the home directory for aparticular account.

(Perhaps I should instead call this a lack in the 'GNU Unix toolchest',since everyone else seems to have