That's nice, but it's only one side. What about the opinion of the developers who wrote the module and licensed it under CDDL?
The incompatibility between CDDL and GPL is well-known, and the authors at Sun made it that way deliberately.
It's not kosher to just say, "Well the authors of the GPL software are okay with it, so it's fine." You need to respect the wishes of the developers who contributed the CDDL code to begin with.
We are okay with it.
Although ZFS developers on all open source platforms are considered OpenZFS developers, I am explicitly listed on the wiki:
http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Contributors#Richard_Yao
I am also the #2 ZFSOnLinux contributor by commit count according to github's statistics and I have maintained that position for years:
https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/graphs/contributors
If any of the other OpenZFS developers had a problem with Linux distributions shipping the OpenZFS code, I ought to have heard about that by now. So far, every OpenZFS developer on every other platform that I meet is happy that the code is available on Linux. I have even met employees at Oracle that are happy about it. While that is not an official stance of Oracle, Oracle itself publishes a dtrace module under the CDDL for use on Linux, so it would be strange to think that they would have a problem with shipping a port of the ZFS driver from the original OpenSolaris codebase under the original license for Linux, especially when it benefits Oracle Linux.
That being said, I am actively avoiding any statements that are repetitive with other comments that I have made on hacker news because they are not productive.
Also, your account was clearly registered in order to reply exclusively to me. Would you care to provide your actual name in a way that can be verified? Otherwise, you are just wasting my time, which will not last much longer as my only replies are going to be for you to identify yourself.
I just consulted with another OpenZFS developer. All new files will be CDDL version 1.0 only. Consequently, this loophole is being closed.
In any case, the contributors who own the rights to the code they submit are free to make it available under any other license they want, whether it be MIT or something else.
> That's nice, but it's only one side. What about the opinion of the developers who wrote the module and licensed it under CDDL?
The developers' opinions don't matter. All contributors used to have to sign a CLA to give copyright to Sun. Then Sun was bought by Oracle. So you should care about what Oracle thinks about copyright infringement.
> The incompatibility between CDDL and GPL is well-known, and the authors at Sun made it that way deliberately.
No, that's bullshit. CDDL (which is just the MPL) is a file-based copyleft because that's what license fitted their requirements. It's not their fault that people have a completely fucked up interpretation of "derivative work" that includes any combination of two completely separately developed works.
Indeed, "derivative work" is a well-understood term of art in Copyright law. So the courts will have to decide if that's truly what they will interpret, or will they take the redistribution & usage restrictions of the GPL as a separable matter.
And it's not as if that admission was ever needed, were you even around back then ?
Solaris was being killed in the market by Linux, Sun decided to go open source in an effort to better compete with Linux, but there was NO way that they would give away their prized technology (ZFS, DTrace) under a license which would allow their main competitor to whom they were losing, to integrate said technology.
Hence CDDL, GPLv2 incompatible.
Wikipedia mentions several other authors. Maybe Wikipedia is wrong, but I am doubtful only one person wrote the CDDL.
> Solaris was being killed in the market by Linux, Sun decided to go open source in an effort to better compete with Linux, but there was NO way that they would give away their prized technology (ZFS, DTrace) under a license which would allow their main competitor to whom they were losing, to integrate said technology.
That is one telling of the story. Other Sun employees have different tellings. It's not as cut and dry as you claim.
CDDL is GPL incompatible in a very subtle way. The copyright of the CDDL licensed code isn't infringed, it's technically the copyright of the GPL code that's infringed. CDDL allows distribution of the binaries under a different license (provided the license doesn't restrict the users' rights, which the GPL doesn't), but the source files must always be under the same license. The GPL requires the source files for the "dervied work" be under the same license, which is where the incompatibility steps in.
I don't see how that's supposed to make sense. The developers/their employers retain copyright to their contributions—even those who signed the contributor agreement. (And it's dead, by the way. Nobody new is signing that agreement, and there's a backlog containing years of changes where the agreement doesn't apply.) So in a world where Oracle is making no indication of changing those terms, the developers' opinions do matter.
And I'm very specifically not just talking about the ZFS people here. This isn't "the ZFS license"; it's the CDDL. There's other software released under the CDDL.
> No, that's bullshit. CDDL (which is just the MPL) is a file-based copyleft because that's what license fitted their requirements. It's not their fault that people have a completely fucked up interpretation of "derivative work" that includes any combination of two completely separately developed works.
Again, this is completely incoherent to me. I recognize the words you're using, and I see that they're arranged in valid sentence structure, but I have no idea what point is supposed to lie in it or what it has to do with what I wrote.
And as I wrote to you before, the CDDL is not "just the MPL". Sun didn't just rename it and appoint themselves as license stewards when they forked the MPL. They made significant changes. They are not the same license.
Certainly Oracle, Sun's legal successor, hasn't publicly complained.
That may be true for the authors of ZFS (and I don't know that it is, but we can agree to accept that it might be true). There are people, though, that when looking for a license to use when releasing their software specifically choose one that is known to be incompatible with the GPL. Among them are people who go with the CDDL.
Saying that we should ignore the license text and treat the CDDL as compatible affects more than just the authors of the project we're talking about.
And if the authors of the code in question are really okay with it being combined with the GPL, then at any time they can make that explicit offering it under a license that is widely accepted to be compatible.
My understanding is that what Canonical is doing here is not a violation of any CDDL licensing terms, and the legal question is purely of whether or not it is a violation of GPL license terms.
Who are the only ones who have a legal interest in the manner in which the CDDL-licensed code at issue is used.
The fact that other people issue code with a license with the same text has no bearing on anything.
> Saying that we should ignore the license text and treat the CDDL as compatible affects more than just the authors of the project we're talking about.
No one is saying that, the argument is that this is not legally a derived work of the GPL-licensed work, so that neither the GPL nor compatibility between the CDDL and the GPL is relevant. No one involved has argued that the CDDL is, or should be treated as, compatible with the GPL.
The CDDL-licensed code is being distributed under the CDDL alone, not the GPL. That's the whole reason some people on the GPL side are complaining. I can't even see what people on the CDDL side would have to complain about under any interpretation of copyright law or either license that anyone has publicly made ever.
The issue at hand is not that the CDDL licensed software is being re-distributed under a GPL license. It's not. The issue is whether or not GPL software and CDDL software can interact in such a way as to violate the GPL license.
I doubt very much that "this can't be ported to a Linux kernel module" was a deciding factor when choosing the CDDL. If it was such an important factor, then they should have modified the CDDL to add such language to the license, which would make this issue much more clear.
The fly in that ointment is Danise Cooper's claim that they chose to base the CDDL on Mozilla's MPL 1.0 license in part for its GPL-incompatibility.
On the other hand, Sun's "Chief Open Source Officer", who introduced her at that talk as "the person who actually wrote the CDDL", later wrote she said that out of spite for losing the argument for licensing OpenSolaris as GPL.
So, who knows.
Are there really? Are there any who state so publicly? Or is this a purely theoretical concern?
I would imagine that the decision to use CDDL by anyone other than Sun/Oracle is based almost completely on "its the only license under which Sun/Oracle will allow me to release this work".
Offhand, I know that star and cdrtools are under a variant of the CDDL called CDDL-Schily, which is the CDDL with an addendum that software under it is "governed by the laws of Germany".
To clarify, by "authors" do you mean individual developers? Or do you mean Sun/Oracle as a corporation.
If you mean individuals, how often do you see individual developers working for multinational companies just wing it with a license choice? (If that is what you are implying). Your comment made it seem as if CDDL was a long and hard personal choice made by each developers, and somehow people here are wiling to discount that hard decision.
I worked for 2 big companies and in neither case had a much of a personal choice in picking licenses for the code. As in thinking "hmm, I think this code today will be MIT, maybe tomorrow I'll feel like Public Domain". It is usually the higher ups / company owners / legal department that decides what the license is and the company as an entity owns the code.
Point being ownership of the code is very concentrated with ZFS, and in this case concentrated in the hands of Oracle + a few outside developers and it is just a file system (albeit a cool one). So that is way of the quickest solution to the impasse is for Oracle to re-license the code.
Of course the other fly in the ointment here is that Oracle has some stake in BTRFS -- a competing filesystem. It was project sponsored by them initially and so I think besides being, well, you know Oracle, they could be interested in stiffing adoption of ZFS to avoid competition with their own project.
I don't understand this line of reasoning, where somebody can say, "person A at Sun says it was intentional", then somebody else says, "person B at Sun says it wasn't intentional", and then acts as if that settles the matter.
All it means is that there's contention about it at best.
... and whether it was intentional or not doesn't affect what the text actually says.
You also ignore the binary kernel object point: Nvidia's drivers are completely proprietary and closed source. How is that in any way less of a violation?
I don't want to seem like I'm trying to dominate the conversation.
(In the meantime, please see my other comments.)
Oracle isn't exactly known for their attempts at fostering good-will with the open source community. Considering that, I don't think they have much incentive to complain now, even if their lawyers are 100% sure that there is a violation of their copyright.
Instead they can just wait for Canonical to hang themselves, then sue them and their customers for the fair market value plus damages. (Maybe they'll offer Canonical's customers a good deal when they switch to Oracle Linux.)
But my point was: IF Oracle thinks their copyright is being violated, they wouldn't complain NOW. If they don't think so, they wouldn't complain either. So Oracle staying silent shouldn't be taken as a signal of their opinion on the matter.
If you look at the .diff.gz associated with Xenial's kernel, linked from http://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/linux-image-4.4.0-7-generi... you will see that this diff adds spl/ and zfs/ directories to the linux source tree. I believe, but don't know for certain because the "[list of files]" links are all broken at the time I write this message, that zfs.ko is in the same binary .deb package as the GPL'd kernel.
That's not to say that mere aggregation is enough to trigger the portions of the GPL that also require a derived work in the copyright sense, but the Conservancy post we started with lays out in detail their view: A particular zfs.ko does nothing until it is linked with a matching version of the Linux kernel; the fact that the linking is dynamic and not static is irrelevant in their analysis.
Canonical hasn't shipped their distro with the ZFS kernel module yet. My impression of Oracle is that they let their lawsuits do the talking.
>You also ignore the binary kernel object point: Nvidia's drivers are completely proprietary and closed source. How is that in any way less of a violation?
AFAIK NVidia's drivers are not a default part of any distribution (including Ubuntu from Canonical) and has to be enabled/installed explicitly by the end user, meanwhile Canonical said they were going to make the ZFS kernel module part of their default distribution.