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Comment by silveira | Hacker News Reader

What about the license compatibility?

The thing with both GPL and CDDL is that they both put restrictions on how you are allowed to distribute the program/source. i.e. you can't legally distribute code that has both GPL and CDDL parts.

However, neither license puts restrictions on (end-user) use, which means that as long as you distribute the bits separately, running them together is perfectly fine. Which means (as their FAQ states) that while it can't ship as part of the kernel, there's no reason end-users wouldn't be allowed to load a separately distributed module into their kernel.

First answer in the FAQ: http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html#WhatAboutTheLicensingIssue

It looks like very similar issues on the use end to the nvidia binary driver. Can't ship it in Linux but nothing (legally) prevents end users from incorporating it.

My concern with the license isn't legal so much as pain of administration. Maybe I'm just old fashion or lazy, but I prefer not to have to check my kernel repo against my kernel module repo to make sure they play nice. It is so much easier when you can just get it as part of the kernel.

That is the reason why I avoid the Nvidia binary driver as well.

If you're on Ubuntu, there's an apt package available in ZFS On Linux project's ppa. It downloads the source, builds it against your installed kernel and installs it. Rebuilds on any kernel update. Very handy.

https://launchpad.net/~zfs-native/+archive/stable

Still unsolved, I guess they just mean it's technically ready for for wide scale deployment.

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