>>>>> "gd" == Garrett D'Amore <garr...@nexenta.com> writes:
gd> There are numerous people in the community that have indicated gd> that they believe that such linking creates a *derivative* gd> work. Donald Becker has made this claim rather forcefully. yes, I think he has a point. The reality is, as long as Linus continues insisting that his ``interpretation'' of the GPL allows loading proprietary modules like ati/nVidia/wireless/... into the Linux kernel, it looks like no one will be sued over a module. This has been holding for a few decades anyway. If everyone with standing to sue is sufficiently under Linus's thumb then you may become safe enough for it to be worth the risk. Also, if they do not distribute their ZFS port to anyone else then they're fine: quite intentionally, they can link anything they like with Linux so long as they never distribute any binaries outside their organization, just like Akamai is fine basing their entire business off GPL'd Squid source code that they've improved vastly and not shared with anyone. We may find ourselves in a position where the guys distributing this Linux ZFS module could be sued and then told ``you have lost the right to distribute the GPL-derived work,'' to which their answer is, ``fine, we do not need to distribute it anyway. We only need to use it internally,'' so confronting them is a net loss for most of the parties with standing to do the confronting. An exception is, it could be a net win for Oracle because if they could shut down zfs.ko then peopo would be forced to run Solaris to get performant ZFS, which might play out in a funny way: Q. We are the owners of foobrulator.c in Linux, a GPLv2 source file. You may not link this CDDL stuff against our foobrulator.c. You have lost the right to distribute foobrulator.c. A. Wait, don't you own the copyright to the more restrictive CDDL stuff in question? Q. Yes, we own the copyrights to both sources, but you cannot link them together. A. HAHAHA you can't be serious. Q. Mwauh hah hah. A. ... who knows. maybe it could happen. In short, * yes zfs.ko could be a little sketchy * other people are doing much sketchier things already and making a lot of money doing it * looking at the big picture is a lot more convoluted than just ``allowed'' or ``OMGillegall!!!!''. If you want your share of this money/fame of the second bullet you might push the envelope as the others have, and consider who has standing to sue whom given a specific way of building and distributing the module, and among those who have standing who has motivation to do it, and finally if they actually do then how much have you got to lose. In other words: business, instead of FUD pedantry and CYA. * in particular, if your business does not involve distributing software... :) * GPL has so much momentum that contributing to a GPL-incompatible project is a significantly less valuable use of your time than contributing to a GPL-compatible one, even and maybe especially if you do not like the GPL. Perl, Apache, BSD, and FSF are all wising up to this and making their licenses more compatible from both directions. CDDL is thus, granted obviously well-liked by some, but very disappointing and regressive to quite a few potential contributors, and this disappointment is widely-understood partly becuse of ZFS+Linux. I almost hope they do not share their port with anyone and use it only internally, and that they make some huge improvements to ZFS that they then claim cannot be given back to Solaris because of license incompatibility. That will send a strong message to the forces of arrogance that crafted a GPL incompatible license at such a late date. In this age of web-scale megacompanies the distinction between GPL-style freedom and BSD-style freedom is much less because operations do not require binary redistributing, but license compatibility does still matter.
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