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Comment by xxpor | Hacker News Reader

Why was CDDL chosen for ZoL?

Because ZFS itself is under Cddl and no one but Oracle can change that.

Theoretically you can re-write all the Oracle parts and then relicesne it. That is how BSD got out from AT&T years ago. This is hard to pull off legally and takes a long time. It is possible, but generally isn't practical.

Surviving a visit from Oracle’s lawyers isn’t practical.

you skipped the part about the lawsuit too.

And if the ongoing mudfight that is Oracle v. Google is any indicator, it's unclear that it would indeed even be legal (it should be, but God only knows how the courts are gonna end up ruling in the end).

ZoL was forked from Oracle ZFS, if you want the real answer you need to ask Oracle, presumably it was so that ZFS would be incompatible with their competition (Linux GPL based work)

Even before Oracle, Sun had licensed it as CDDL. So Oracle itself may not be able to answer that question anymore.

CDDL includes patent grants which GPL (et cetera) does not. CDDL allows also file-based licensing, which allows for projects with combined free/nonfree sources to be distributed, which was a requirement for Solaris. It's not that they chose CDDL to make it not work on Linux, they created CDDL because they didn't have a choice.

Sun created CDDL in order to be Linux GPLv2 incompatible, even the person who was tasked by Sun management to write CDDL (Danese Cooper) said so.

And it's not as if that admission was needed, as anything else would have been insane from Sun.

They were losing badly to Linux, so in the eleventh hour they decided to go open source in an attempt at getting more mindshare = marketshare.

Solaris had some real technical advantages over Linux like ZFS and DTrace, however if they licensed Solaris with a GPLv2 compatible license, Linux could just incorporate their coveted tech, which would be business suicide. Hence CDDL.

You can't blame them given the situation they were in.

additionally FSF and Sun weren't able to agree to have compatible copyleft clauses.

Oracle (presumably) acquired the copyright when they acquired Sun, so they actually could (presumably) answer that question with, say, a GPL'd release.

That'd mean Oracle actually using their army of litigators for good, though, and it'll be a cold day in Hell when that happens.

Got me! Right you are, I should have made that distinction, thanks for clarifying.

Ah I didn't realize it was a fork, I had thought it was a clean room implementation.

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