Comment by jgowdy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jgowdy | Hacker News Reader

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It's incredible to me how many people are suddenly comfortable violating the license of ZFS, simply because Cannonical says it's okay? This is an open source project, under an OSI approved open source license (CDDL) which is quite known to not be GPL compatible. The license is derived from MPL 1.1, which is also known to not be GPL compatible. Why did they bother creating MPL 2, when we could have just ignored the GPL incompatibility in MPL 1.1?

You can't be someone who loses their mind over GPL violations, but then willfully misinterpret someone else's open source license because they have something you want. The developers involved specifically picked CDDL because it wasn't GPL compatible. That was their desire / intent, and so that's the license they went with. By ignoring the license and the clearly known intent of the developers in choosing that license, simply because they made something you really want, I believe that ZFS on Linux is really a form of theft in the open source world. It's the same sort of attitude that leads to GPL violations.

I don't agree with making things CDDL to be explicitly GPL incompatible, but I do believe in respecting the author of the software in question and the license he or she chose. If people choose licenses I don't agree with, I don't use their software. I don't just use it anyway and pretend like there's no license issue.

You don't have to be RMS to see that these people who are ignoring the licensing issues (not just shipping user mode tools like a FUSE implementation which is legit) honestly don't care about open source and licensing and copyleft. They just see something someone else made that they want and they take it and ignore the licensing and developer intent. How can we hope to enforce the GPL successfully but then ignore other OSI approved licenses when it suits us?

This is why big names in Linux kernel development aren't remotely interested in ZFS.

Not to mention the fact that the users of ZFS on Linux are all setting themselves up for Oracle to bring the licensing inquisition.

It's an open legal question if a user loadable module violates the CDDL/GPL. Until its fully litigated, its going to remain an open question.

As an example: the FSF's position is that yes, if you dynamically link against a GPLd binary that all the code has to be GPLd, and if one wants to link against a copy-left library in a non copy left program the library has to use the LGPL. However, the LGPL predates dynamic linking. It's from the days of static linking where the (L)GPLd could would be distributed together in a single binary. In the world of dynamic linking that isn't true anymore.

A primary example is libreadline. It is (or was?) GPLd and the FSF use this a hammer to try and get other code to be GPL. However, this (as far as I know) was never actually litigated.

As another example: the Linux kernel is under GPL2, Linus makes it clear that closed source programs can use the syscall interface without a problem, but its not clear that if he didn't say this that they couldn't. He includes the note to clarify his position that they can for those that would be concerned. i.e. the argument would be that without the syscall note, one couldn't ship any hardware device (say an appliance you stick in your rack) with linux and proprietary software. My gut is that most would find that difficult to swallow.

As an aside: I personally feel this has similarity to the google / oracle java lawsuit. If one thinks that APIs cannot be copyrighted then arguably anything that just uses APIs and doesn't embed the actual GPLd code one should be fine as the APIs aren't able to be copyrighted. If on the other hand one views APIs are able to copyrighted as well, then it would be much more clear that the FSF's position is correct. Though the usage might still be fair use (and to an extent one might argue that its even more fair use than Google's usage)

If this ever does get litigated, I'll be following closely as would be very interested (intellectually at least) in the result.

TLDR: until its actually litigated, everyone who claims to speak an absolute truth is speaking out of their ass. Lawyers are a conservative bunch in general so they'll give you the most conservative answer in terms of what you can do, that doesn't mean its the absolute truth in terms of what you can and cannot do.

What we do know is the intent of the developers in open sourcing their work and that those working on these ports are violating that intent. They specifically chose this license with the belief that it protected their software from being consumed by GNU/Linux.

The counterargument, maybe their license doesn't block us from using their work in the way they think it does, and until it's proven in court we won't know is extremely offensive and self-serving.

This is the same argument raised by many GPL violators. "The GPL hasn't been proven well enough in court in my jurisdiction so I'm just going to use your code in violation of your license terms."

This is theft, an open source license violation, and lawyering to defend that theft. It violates the principles of open source. We are literally discussing an OSI approved license. I believe that any responsible member of the open source community would respect the authors license and not try to lawyer their license out of your way so you can have their code on your terms.

If this was Linux devs and GPL, rather than Solaris devs and CDDL, everyone would be on the other side of this argument. It's hypocrisy and it should be called out.

Do we actually "know"? Cause I "know" that the opposition to GPL was not to make it incompatible with GPL (which is a point of contention actually, and hits deeply into question of when a code is derived code). The point was that making OpenSolaris GPL would block integration chances with NON-GPL projects.

In fact, at least one anecdote points out that Sun expected CDDL components to make it into Linux source, just like cases of other non-GPL components in the past (AFS, for example)

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