>>>>> "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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