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Comment by michaelmrose | Hacker News Reader

It's not that it doesn't play fair. Sun published under a license that made inclusion in the kernel impossible thus the current developers are bound by the same decisions regardless of their opinion on the matter.

Furthermore it is profoundly curious to claim that a cross platform filesystem that began life on Solaris and existed for years as a stable complete work before being ported to several OS including Linux becomes by virtue of a bridge a derivative work of Linux. It's magical thinking.

It is entirely acceptable that they aren't responsible for out of tree code working but it would be great if they didn't deliberately sabotage other projects which is what they did here.

>My tolerance for ZFS is pretty non-existant. Sun explicitly did not want their code to work on Linux, so why would we do extra work to get their code to work properly?

The extra work is 10 seconds of work. How childish and unprofessional.

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> The extra work is 10 seconds of work. How childish and unprofessional.

While Oracle keeping the code under incompatible license for more than 10 years is totally OK.

What does it have to do with the zfs developers who no longer work for oracle?

It has to do with people barking at the wrong tree.

> Furthermore it is profoundly curious to claim that a cross platform filesystem that began life on Solaris and existed for years as a stable complete work before being ported to several OS including Linux becomes by virtue of a bridge a derivative work of Linux. It's magical thinking.

please don't confuse the source code and the resulting binaries. to the extent that the zsh source code does not derive from Linux, it is not a derivative work.

but the binaries built for Linux will necessarily be derivative of both.

and we regularly redistribute binaries; this indeed is what Linux distributions ordinarily do.

if you only write the bridging code and/or distribute the module source, you may be quite protected. but if you distribute a patch from the mainline to include zsh, or a mixed tarball of Linux+zsh, or even compiled Linux kernels complete with a loadable zsh module, you may be in breach. all of these clearly derive from multiple sources with incompatible licences.

It's not magical thinking. A work can be a derivative of multiple other works. It's completely plausible that adding Linux stuff to ZFS can make it a derivative work of Linux in addition to being a derivative work of whatever else it is already a derivative work of. There's room for debate about how much Linux stuff (and of what nature) something like ZFS can incorporate before it becomes a derivative work according to copyright law and the GPLv2, but you cannot dismiss the idea outright.

Magical indeed. Except that public opinion counts for nothing in copyright law; you have to fight it out in court. Luckily, Sun isn't the kind of company that would file questionable lawsuits against Linux users just to... wait.. wasn't Sun bought by another company?

Well, whoever owns the copyright now, you're probably reasonably safe unless they're a hyper-litigious corporation with deep pockets and an army of lawyers, who see lawsuits about software licensing as a potential source of income....

I mean, what are the chances?

Let's say I make a movie M. It's a nice movie, but it doesn't have music. Someone else wrote some music S that is quite lovely. If anybody takes my movie M and mixes in music S, then the new movie is a derivative work of both M and S.

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