The decision to make XFS open-source was announced in May, and the first release of code was announced Tuesday (Aug. 10) at the Linux World conference by Dave McAllister, SGI director of strategic technologies. Coincidentally, SGI picked the same day to launch a restructuring plan that included the pending spin-off of Cray Research, an SGI subsidiary.

Speaking alongside Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation and pioneer of the free-software movement that led to the creation of Linux, McAllister said the SGI decision has been years in the making.

SGI in 1992 released Hylafax, the first fax server, as open-source software, meaning developers can view and tinker with the source code. Since then, internal factions have been pushing for more of an open-source approach at the company. "Open source fits SGI's nature," McAllister said.

"It goes back to the enabling-technology viewpoint — the longer a technology is spread, the more it enables," he said.

GPL is arguably the most popular of the open-source licenses. Stallman's own informal scan of Freshmeat, a free-software repository, found 60 percent of available downloads using GPL. In addition, developers had asked that SGI consider licensing XFS under GPL, McAllister said.

XFS is a "journaled" file system produced by SGI. Linux requires a file system for its operation; a journaled version keeps track of activity, allowing the file system to be restored in the event of a crash. A journaled file system is not yet included in the Linux kernel.

The first open-source subset of XFS was posted to the Web late Monday (Aug. 9), McAllister said. The code is available for downloading from the Web.

Chunks of XFS are copyrighted by the likes of Bell Labs or the University of California at Berkeley and can't be released as open-source. More pieces of XFS will become available as open-source code once SGI is confident they contain no copyrights, McAllister said.