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Comment by riffraff | Hacker News Reader

I may be wrong but I don't think it's just "excessive freeness", the CDDL also has restrictions the GPL does not have (stuff about patents), it's mutual incompatibility.

Apache v2 and GPLv3 were made explicitly compatible while providing different kinds of freedom.

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The CDDL is more permissive, it's a weak copyleft license while the GPL is strong copyleft, and that makes the two incompatible. Calling it "excessive freeness" is inflammatory, but they're broadly correct.

> The CDDL is more permissive, it's a weak copyleft license while the GPL is strong copyleft, and that makes the two incompatible. Calling it "excessive freeness" is inflammatory, but they're broadly correct.

It's not really. Many aspects of the license are free-er, but that's not what causes the incompatibility. The GPL does not have any kind of clause saying code that is distributed under too permissive of a license may not be incorporated into a derived/combined work. It's not that it's weak copyleft, it is that it contains particular restrictions that makes it incompatible with GPL's restrictions.

BSD licenses do not have that incompatible restriction (= are freer than CDDL, in that aspect) and can be compatible with the GPL.

The basic problem is that both licenses have a "you must redistribute under this license, and you can't impose additional restrictions"-type clause. There are some other differences between the licences, but that's what the incompatibility is about.

Some have argued that this may not actually constitute an incompatibility, but not many are keen to "fuck around and find out" with Oracle's lawyers. So here we are.

> but not many are keen to "fuck around and find out" with Oracle's lawyers

Oracle could spend 10 minutes and clear this up, but the fact they don't should be fear enough about any large company shipping with OpenZFS code.

See Oracle vs Google

I'm not sure if it's that easy, because all the contributors to OpenZFS also need to sign off an a license change, right?

That said, they did relicense DTrace to GPL a few years back. but I don't really know the details on that, or how hard it was, or if that's also possible for OpenZFS.

This is a complete misunderstanding. People take MIT code and put it in the kernel all the time. The issue is that the CDDL is not GPL-compatible because it has restrictions which the GPL doesn't have.

I think the whole license stuff is controlling software too much. All that legal blah has nothing to do with software and is only good for feeding overpriced lawyers.

When I publish code I don't pick any license. It's just free for anyone to use for whatever. I don't like the GPL for this, it's way too complicated. I don't want to deal with that.

It's a shame some legal BS like that is holding back the deployment of a great filesystem like ZFS.

>When I publish code I don't pick any license. It's just free for anyone to use for whatever.

That's not good in all cases as in some jurisdictions it means that any use is forbidden...

I just don't care about jurisdictions or legal frameworks. I just care about technology.

It's also really only a big thing in the US. Here in Europe things are usually settled amicably and the courts frown on people taking up their time with bullshit. They only really get involved if all else fails and only really for businesses. Nobody really cares about software licensing except the top 200 companies.

I'm admittedly a bit biased though. Unfortunately I sometimes have to deal with our internal legal dept. in the US (I'm based in Europe) and I find them such nasty people to deal with. Always really pushy. This made me hate them and their trade.

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