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Comment by intsunny | Hacker News Reader

Before all the ZFS people chime in:

Some of us will NEVER accept ZFS's licensing. The ability to remain absolutely vigilant in regards to licensing immensely helped IBM during the SCO v. IBM debacle in regards to the JFS file system. We have learned this E-X-A-C-T lesson before.

Additionally, since the code originates from Oracle, many of us progress from being vigilant to outright paranoid. Oracle has never been forgiving, warm, soft, nor cuddly. Hell, even Torvalds himself wants Larry Ellison to personally sign off on ever including ZFS into the Linux kernel [0]

[0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linus-Sa...

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Oracle could easily fix the ZFS licensing situation by releasing CDDLv2 resolving the GPL incompatibility. Then via the CDDLv1 auto-upgrade clause, most of OpenZFS could be made compatible with the GPL. Some parts would have to be relicensed to no longer opt out of the auto-upgrade clause or rewritten from scratch to enable the auto-upgrade clause. All other CDDLv1+ software would be made GPL compatible at the same time. After that OpenZFS could be included in Linux. Some more discussion about that on LWN. Does anyone know someone at Oracle that could get the ball rolling on CDDLv2?

https://lwn.net/Articles/894901/

In the absence of Oracle playing ball, I wonder how (in)feasible it would be to relicence the code of other contributors, then build on that.

OpenSSL recently went through a such a relicening and rewriting project. It took years, alas.

I expect Oracle still holds copyright on a lot of the OpenZFS code, so probably not very feasible.

OpenSSL could change the license on most of the initial code base. AFAIK, ZFS is the exact opposite, with the majority of the core code having been owned by Sun and nobody can change its license now but oracle. I'm pretty sure that you're talking about a nearly complete rewrite.

Given Oracle's track record, I advise extreme caution on behalf of the mainline kernel with respect to code that Oracle could claim to have developed.

I'm less sympathetic to sour grapes about ZFS. Kernel developers including Torvalds have made false negative remarks about ZFS vs Btrfs; the SFC deployed implausible legal theories made veiled threats against Ubuntu for maintaining a patch to Linux at their own risk allowing OpenZFS to be used.

> Some of us will NEVER accept ZFS's licensing.

And yet the kernel community has been remarkably relaxed about Intel's golden screwdriver code and NVidia's binary blobs. Nothing if not inconsistent.

I'm actually curious; did anybody ever offer an explanation for why Nvidia can ship a binary driver with a tiny shim and not get any blowback while ZFS shipping an open source driver with a small GPL shim gets everyone up in arms?

>Nvidia can ship a binary driver with a tiny shim and not get any blowback

The opposite is true for every linux circle I am familiar with.

Nobody likes them, but unless I missed something nobody's suggesting for instance that it's illegal for them to be distributing their modules either

gregkh has said this about binary modules

> It's just that I'm so damn tired of this whole thing. I'm tired of people thinking they have a right to violate my copyright all the time. I'm tired of people and companies somehow treating our license in ways that are blatantly wrong and feeling fine about it. Because we are a loose band of a lot of individuals, and not a company or legal entity, it seems to give companies the chutzpah to feel that they can get away with violating our license.

See also https://lwn.net/Articles/603131/ among others

Sure, but he's never taken any action against Nvidia, whereas he has against OpenZFS (which is open source, I note).

Because they fear pissing off nvidia. Everyone wants their gpu to work after all.

Yes, but are those Linux circles are committing changes to cripple Nvidia's stuff?

Apparently Linux was quite welcoming to Oracle and IBM contributions on the early days, back when big iron UNIX ruled the POSIX world.

> 1998: Many major companies such as IBM, Compaq and Oracle announce their support for Linux.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux

Maybe they could stop giving that 2.6% as well, https://lwn.net/Articles/839772/

Ironically, Oracle employees are recently the primary maintainers of JFS in Linux.

What do you mean by not accepting?

The only concern is the distribution and you would mean you don't accept the fact that it can't go in the kernel or be released as part of the distro installer?

It's not hard to download zfs separately and use it like any distro is doing without having any licensing problems.

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