Hacker News Reader

Comment by DominoTree | Hacker News Reader

I believe that Bryan Cantrill has stated that it was surprising to the people at Sun when outside parties didn't start incorporating ZFS and other technologies into Linux, because the original intention when the CDDL was written was not to be GPL-incompatible.

Edit: dwrensha posted a related comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11176361) with a YouTube link of Bryan making the statement.

View on HN

I'm going to go with the actual author of the licence (Danese), and not just because she authored it but because the idea that Sun management, seeing themselves struggle against Linux, would allow Linux to use their prized ZFS and DTrace, and thus offer even less reason to choose Solaris over Linux is simply insane from any kind of business point.

And not even now do we have anyone arguing here that CDDL is not GPL-incompatible, people accept that and Linus refuses to merge any CDDL code in to mainline, what is being discussed here is if ZFS counts as a derivative (and thus has to be GPL compatible) when it runs as a kernel module in Linux kernel space.

If that was the intent, is it not something that can be clarified and fix the problem? Or did they screw up too badly and it's unambiguously incompatible no matter what they say?

It may be the case that now there's simply nobody who cares in a position to actually get it fixed

Yeah. If there's an unintended license-compatibility problem, the people who'd need to fix it are Oracle's lawyers. They might have a different attitude towards Open Source than Sun, to put it mildly.

Wouldn't a clarification of intent be based on evidence from the people that created the license? It doesn't matter what the lawyers think, they can't change history. You'd need the lawyers to relicense, a completely different way to solve the issue.

Intent and two dollars will get you a cup of coffee. The court will read the license that was written, not the one that Sun intended to write.

Yes and no.

If they actually wrote the wrong thing, then intent is irrelevant.

But if the meaning of a term is unclear, then you can clarify the meaning.

The problem is not the CDDL but the GPL in that case. That's the same reason GPL2 and GPL3 are incompatible.

That is easy to disprove. If CDDL did not care, then one could follow the conditions in GPLv2 and the two licenses would be compatible.

License incompatibility can only occur if two license has conditions which are mutually exclusive. In this case, CDDL demands that source code must be distributed only under the terms of CDDL, and GPLv2 require that the distributed source code is made available under GPLv2. You can not comply with one without breaking the other, and thus we have license incompatibility.

> That is easy to disprove. If CDDL did not care, then one could follow the conditions in GPLv2 and the two licenses would be compatible.

The entire point of the CDDL is that it's module local. The only way to achieve GPL compatibility is to become the GPL. That would be impossible for the CDDL to do.

Why would Oracle spend any time correcting it? If you haven't figured out by now Oracle won't spend money on anything they don't think will make them money, I'm not sure what to tell you. And clarifying this doesn't seem like a path that would make them any amount of money.

I doubt that every single person that could clarify is employed by Oracle in 2016.

But my understanding after reading everything else is that the license is blatantly incompatible and there is no possible clarification that could fix it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com