21 ms·

GPL Violations Related to Combining ZFS and Linux

252 points by dwc 11y ago

swills 11y ago
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
teddyh 11y ago
It is my understanding that Sun's lawyers originally created the CDDL to be GPL-incompatible, with the specific desire that code under that license should not be able to aid their then-competitor, Linux. How Canonical can suddenly decide that Sun's lawyers were wrong about this, I don't know. I suspect wishful thinking.
- the_mitsuhiko 11y ago
  > It is my understanding that Sun's lawyers originally created the CDDL to be GPL-incompatible, with the specific desire that code under that license should not be able to aid their then-competitor, Linux. Schwartz (or Sun under Schwartz) was not a fan of the GPL. As far as I remember they were hoping that Linux and OpenSolaris would together somehow migrate to an imaginary GPLv3 that never happened.
  - yuhong 11y ago
    "Jonathan Schwartz" is the correct name for the former CEO you are referring to.
    - hnbroseph 11y ago
      they mention Schwartz... was there an edit?
      - yuhong 11y ago
        Yes.
  - baldfat 11y ago
    http://www.cnet.com/news/sun-criticizes-popular-open-source-license/ http://www.cnet.com/news/sun-criticizes-popular-open-source-... This is an article on the GPL with SUN QUOTE: "Schwartz singled out the GPL provision that says source code may be mixed with other code only if the other code also is governed by the GPL. That provision is intended to create a body of software that must remain liberated from proprietary constraints. But Schwartz said that some people he's spoken to dislike it because it precludes them from using open-source software as a foundation for proprietary projects."
    - gillianseed 11y ago
      And then he went and released Java under the GPL.
- DominoTree 11y ago
  I believe that Bryan Cantrill has stated that it was surprising to the people at Sun when outside parties didn't start incorporating ZFS and other technologies into Linux, because the original intention when the CDDL was written was not to be GPL-incompatible. Edit: dwrensha posted a related comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11176361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11176361) with a YouTube link of Bryan making the statement.
  - Dylan16807 11y ago
    If that was the intent, is it not something that can be clarified and fix the problem? Or did they screw up too badly and it's unambiguously incompatible no matter what they say?
    - DominoTree 11y ago
      It may be the case that now there's simply nobody who cares in a position to actually get it fixed
      - gherkin0 11y ago
        Yeah. If there's an unintended license-compatibility problem, the people who'd need to fix it are Oracle's lawyers. They might have a different attitude towards Open Source than Sun, to put it mildly.
        Dylan16807 11y ago
        Wouldn't a clarification of intent be based on evidence from the people that created the license? It doesn't matter what the lawyers think, they can't change history. You'd need the lawyers to relicense, a completely different way to solve the issue.
        lmm 11y ago
        Intent and two dollars will get you a cup of coffee. The court will read the license that was written, not the one that Sun intended to write.
- dwrensha 11y ago
  As a counterpoint, here's a 2011 video of Bryan Cantrill claiming that it is "emphatically not the case" that the CDDL was specifically developed to be GPL-incompatible: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=1375 https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=1375
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - awalton 11y ago
    It may not have been the "original intention" of the license, for whatever value of "original intention" that means, but it certainly was used for exactly this purpose - to keep the code out of Linux. Whether or not it was just a "happy accident" the CDDL was not GPL compatible, or whether it was engineered to be that way, I believe is mostly a moot point. (Though I'm still nowhere near believing Bryan Cantrill on this point. The executives and lawyers could have easily done this without the software developers involved ever knowing until after the fact.) The GPL incompatibility was a well known fact before both of those tools were released, and it's frankly unbelievable this point wasn't raised internally at Sun before OpenSolaris walked out the door, given how much public discussion went into the license after it was first announced. The Sun executives knew exactly what they were doing when they chose that specific license for distributing D-Trace and ZFS.
    - bcantrill 11y ago
      I think all concerned (executives, lawyers, engineers) were simply trying to do the right thing by our source base, Sun's customers and the budding OpenSolaris community -- we really weren't trying to placate (or alienate) the Linux community, and didn't really factor in how the Linux community perceived its own license. As for OpenSolaris, there were a couple of constraints with respect to the GPL: first, we didn't want to dual license (i.e., GPL + something else), because that was a mess that could lead to a license-based fork -- something we definitely wanted to avoid. Second, there was great concern about simply using the GPL because of exactly the ambiguity that's highlighted here: in 2005, we had many independent hardware vendors that had entirely proprietary Solaris drivers -- it was important to us that those be allowed to stay proprietary. We all liked the BSD license, but we also liked the idea of a weak copyleft -- and in that regard, the license that best captured what we were after was the MPL, despite some (minor) issues too that needed to be cleaned up. In the end, this is what we did (the CDDL is really just a cleaned up MPL) -- but (to be clear, and for what feels like the millionth time) we did it because of what we were trying to do for our own software and community, not because we were somehow trying to punish Linux. As I've said before, one of my most vivid memories of the whole process was immediately after we launched OpenSolaris, standing in the conference room where we had just hit the carriage return, chatting with Chris Nadan from Sun Legal. We were both wondering aloud how long it would take for DTrace to show up in Linux -- but not from the perspective of license compatibility: we both accepted as a given that Linux would either view the licenses as compatible enough or wouldn't care about any incompatibility (after all, this is years after NVIDIA's binary drivers). Our only discussion was how much members of the Linux community would care about DTrace and how difficult the port would be technically. I remember saying that "maybe it will be two months, and maybe as long as two years." Of course, it was only a month or so later that SystemTap emerged from Red Hat -- and it became clear that Not-Invented-Here Syndrome would prove to be a much stronger force than any technical desire to assimilate DTrace or ZFS into Linux...
LeoPanthera 11y ago
I was not aware of the subtleties regarding the ZFS license. Would it be possible (read: legal) for someone to modify the ZFS source to be more easily buildable into the Linux kernel, but then distribute it as source code only, such that an end user can build a ZFS-enabled Linux kernel on their own? Surely as long as the end user didn't distribute the resulting kernel, that would be OK? Edit: I see that this has been done. Thanks. :)
- teddyh 11y ago
  The article states that Debian does this, and gives a link: http://blog.halon.org.uk/2016/01/on-zfs-in-debian/ http://blog.halon.org.uk/2016/01/on-zfs-in-debian/
- dmm 11y ago
  > Would it be possible (read: legal) for someone to modify the ZFS source to be more easily buildable into the Linux kernel, but then distribute it as source code only Yes and that has been done. The ZFS on Linux[0] distributes a DKMS source package that each user of ZoL uses to build a binary kernel module. DKMS automatically builds the module without manual interaction from the user, similarly to installing a regular binary package. This is legal but the resulting kernel/zfs module is non-redistributable. [0] http://zfsonlinux.org/ http://zfsonlinux.org/
  - belovedeagle 11y ago
    Indeed, it's possible and even mostly-supported (at least on Gentoo) to compile the code into the kernel; i.e., not as a module. I have a zfs system without kmod support (reduces a huge attack surface and just seems cleaner).
mankash666 11y ago
This article somehow implies a moral obligation on Oracle's behalf to either modify their licence or code to be gpl compliant. I sincerely hope they don't as the GPL brigade is getting louder in their intolerance of other licences.
- chimeracoder 11y ago
  > the GPL brigade is getting louder in their intolerance of other licences. I really don't see much evidence of this, certainly not from the FSF/SFC, who specifically do not discourage use of free licenses that are GPL-compatible, such as the BSD and MIT licenses[0]. The anti-GPL crowd is much more vocal about their distaste for the GPL, especially on forums like HN. The issue at hand is the use of a license which is not compatible with the GPL. No matter which way you slice it, that's a massive inconvenience to everyone, and pretty much nobody wins as a result. (As for relicensing, it is literally impossible to change the license of Linux at this point, because the rights are held by thousands of contributors individually (some of whom are dead, and tracking copyright as it passes across estates is a notoriously difficult task[1]). If there's ever going to be a reconciliation between ZFS and Linux, it would require Oracle to relicense ZFS under any one of the many GPL-compatible licenses.) [0] They do, incidentally, discourage the use of the terms "BSD license" and "MIT license", arguing that those are ambiguous and should be deprecated in favor of "3-clause BSD license" and "X11 license", respectively. But that has nothing to do with the discussion at hand, which is about the use of the actual licenses themselves and the terms they represent, not the names that people use to call them. [1] Even figuring out if a given book can be reprinted is prohibitively difficult for publishers, and that's with works that only have one single author.
  - Sleaker 11y ago
    I think you got it backwards, the massive inconvenience for everyone is that Linux is using the GPL and people don't want to have to deal with all the re-licensing compatibility bullshit just to be able to distribute a binary of some other FOSS. seriously, CDDL is FSF/OSI approved. Sure, Oracle could resolve it by switching to a GPL compatible license, but the problem is not oracle's clearly free software. The problem is GPL forcibly does not allow perfectly fine open source licensed software to be distributed in binary form due to it's copyleft.
kevin_b_er 11y ago
Even if we ignore the ZFS license itself, the SF Conservancy appears to be arguing that _all_ proprietary kernel modules are GPL violations.
- bryanlarsen 11y ago
  Exactly. They're arguing the combined work clause, which would automatically rule out all binary-only modules, such as nvidia.ko. Most previous arguments about zfs.ko were about the derived work clause, which is much more grey. I belive that nvidia.ko would be more likely to be ruled a derived work than ZFS.ko, but that's hard to tell. It does seem silly to argue about ZFS in this context. ZFS is open source and much less offensive to kernel developers than nvidia.ko.[1] If nvidia.ko is fine, then so is zfs.ko. If nvidia.ko isn't fine, zfs.ko may or may not be fine. Ubuntu has been shipping nvidia.ko for years. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ
  - snuxoll 11y ago
    Of course the argument to be had here is OpenZFS lives completely independent of the Linux kernel, it runs on Illumos and FreeBSD and the availability of a Linux kernel module in no way makes or breaks the project. As such, is it a derived work since it is not dependent on the Linux kernel to exist? This is the argument the Illumos developers make about including the GPL'ed KVM code, KVM does not depend on Illumos to exist, as such does loading the KVM module into an Illumos kernel constitute a derived work? Conveniently, this is also precedent that could be set during the VMWare case the SFC is also perusing - we could either see ZFS relegated to being available anywhere but Linux and binary kernel modules totally banned (bad for nVidia, good for AMD), or a total change in the landscape of open source licensing (for better or worse).
  - cjbprime 11y ago
    > Ubuntu has been shipping nvidia.ko for years. Is that true? I thought Ubuntu's support for nvidia.ko involved downloading source code to the local machine and compiling it there, to avoid distributing a GPL violation.
  - 11y ago
devit 11y ago
Why isn't Canonical using btrfs? (which is supposed to provide many or all of the features that one would want to use ZFS for, and is GPLed)
- DominoTree 11y ago
  Because it still doesn't have the stability and maturity of ZFS (which has seen over a decade of production use)
  - LeoPanthera 11y ago
    OpenSUSE is using it for root, so I assume they think it is stable enough. (Interestingly, they use XFS for /home)
    - DominoTree 11y ago
      Yeah, but is anybody using OpenSUSE? :P Edit: Wow, I just checked DistroWatch and they've been #4 for some time now...
      - snuxoll 11y ago
        There's a lot of interest in OpenSUSE tumbleweed from what I've gathered.
      - j_koreth 11y ago
        There are more continents using linux than America ;)
      - lmm 11y ago
        Most of Europe. At times it feels like there are almost parallel OSS ecosystems on the two sides of the Atlantic.
    - ewzimm 11y ago
      I'm using openSUSE Leap with a default partition scheme, and it's btrfs all the way down to home.
dsp1234 11y ago
in this context, Oracle could make everyone's life easier by waving their magic relicensing wand. Well, so could the linux developers by relicensing to MIT. That's not much of an argument. Additionally, I'd still love to see an actual court case with regards to the GPL here. Licensing is always murky, because almost none of it has been tested directly in the courts. Thus the only legal opinions we have are from people who have a vested interest in the outcome one way or another. Let a court solve it once and for all please. In particular, I'd love to have a 100% lock on whether a binary module that links to the kernel is actually a derivative work or not.
- ajross 11y ago
  The "linux developers" aren't a single entity. You'd need a separate release from theoretically every copyright holder (or a really good legal argument for a subset that defines all the conflicting APIs). The point here was practical, not moral. Linux, in practice, can't relicense the kernel. Oracle, in practice, can relicense ZFS. Thus the "magic wand" comment.
  - dsp1234 11y ago
    Does Oracle own the code for all of the existent OpenZFS code that Canonical imported? If not, then doesn't there exist the same issue that all of the developers would also need to relicense?
    - ori_b 11y ago
      Companies generally require copyright assignment.
    - ajross 11y ago
      Arrgh. The same issue in principle, but not in practice. "All the developers" of OpenZFS are Oracle Corporation, plus a few dozen other folks we can grep from the commit log. And if they don't consent and Oracle does, surely the community can duplicate the effort quickly. In practice (that word again) all the meaningful copyright to ZFS sits inside Oracle headquarters. It's just not the same. (Also, as another poster points out, it's possible that all OpenZFS copyright is already assigned to Oracle -- I have no particular knowledge)
ikeboy 11y ago
GPLv2 contains the line >This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. So couldn't the FSF fix this by releasing a later version of the GPL that allows for this combination? https://www.gnu.org/licenses/rms-why-gplv3.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/rms-why-gplv3.html seems to imply that that wouldn't work, but I don't understand why. Can someone with more experience with the GPLs enlighten me?
- snuxoll 11y ago
  Linus removed that line from the kernel license because he disagreed with the tivoization clause in GPLv3, so the Linux kernel will forever remain GPLv2.
  - davexunit 11y ago
    GPLv3 was not released until 2007. AFAIK, Linux has been GPLv2-only since it started using GPLv2 in the 90s.
    - snuxoll 11y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU - he telegraphed GPLv3 many, many years in advance - just because it wasn't published until 2007 doesn't mean there wasn't talk about it for a long time before then.
  - bryanlarsen 11y ago
    Linus removed that line before GPLv3 was created because he didn't want to give the FSF the ability to arbitrarily relicense his work to a license that he didn't have a chance to vet. If he liked the GPLv3 he may have added the line back in, but he hasn't done so for the reason you mentioned.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
dragonwriter 11y ago
I think what's cute is the part where they point out why citing lawyer's (especially those employed by interested parties) opinions is not helpful because of the biases lawyers have to aggressively represent the interest of their parties, such that their opinions will generally reflect not the most likely correct view of the law but the view of the law most favorable to the interests of their clients -- and then, in the next paragraph, proceed to present their lawyers' opinion of the key and fundamental determining factor in the situation. Which, of course -- as they've just telegraphed -- reflects SFConservancy's vested interests in a maximalist interpretation of what is a "derived work", since that is what maximizes the scope of works to which the necessity to adhere to a license (like the GPL) applies.
- FireBeyond 11y ago
  What I'm really curious to find out is who Ubuntu talked to - the original discussions of this had Canonical saying they consulted "industry's leading software freedom legal counsel". "There are as many opinions as there are lawyers. You just have to find the one you need."
  - dsp1234 11y ago
    That's a good question. Apparently Debian got the ok from the Software Freedom Law Center[0], but they distribute it as source only, and the binary is built on the end user's computer (and they consider it then unredistributable). This is different than what Canonical is claiming to do which is to generate the binary themselves. [0] - https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/04/msg00006.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/04/msg00...
- geofft 11y ago
  They're pretty clear about their own biases (e.g., they provide legal advice to Debian, they're involved with the VMware suit). But more importantly, they are pretty clear that they believe their lawyers' opinion to be the majority one among lawyers who have thought about this question: "Canonical has found some lawyers who disagree — a minority position, from our understanding of community norms."
Sanddancer 11y ago
At this point, oracle can't wave their magic wand, as the SFC implies, and have the software be magically gpl-compatible. Since Oracle re-closed solaris, a lot of other entities have branched and forked and merged code into the openzfs codebase under the cddl. So you'd have to get in contact with all those entities to get it relicensed, unless you want to work on an ancient version of ZFS.
- carussell 11y ago
  Not true. It doesn't matter who owns the copyright, because Sun has the keys to the kingdom and can publish a revision to the CDDL whenever they want. Forward compatibility is not something you opt-in to with the CDDL (unlike you have to do with the GPL). This is, for example, how Mozilla has been relicensed to MPL 2.0 from earlier versions of the license—which the CDDL is based on, incidentally—even though there are no "any later version" notices anywhere in the headers or other files.
hoistor 11y ago
Am I missing something obvious here? Is it a GPL violation to create a separate .deb which includes only the binary kernel module for zfs which can be simply apt-get'd? Or are canonical planning on including the zfs code in the base 'kernel-blabla' package? If the latter, why not just have a sep package for the module? I imagine you'll need to install some 'zfs' package to get the userland tools anyway ?
- rcthompson 11y ago
  The single "zfs.ko" file that contains the ZFS kernel module is derived from both the ZFS sources and the Linux kernel sources, because you need the Linux kernel sources to link a module with the Linux kernel. (Actually I think you just need the headers, but those are GPLv2 anyway, so the distinction is irrelevant.)
  - josteink 11y ago
    Actually they are LGPL, according to other posts in this thread. Which would make it perfectly OK. I'm not well enough traversed in the kernel source to find a direct reference but you see commits like this every now and then: https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=09a77a885233e2a20dac2635a79c83ccf50a26a1 https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.... Having parts of the kernel LGPLed doesn't seem like an unusual or odd thing, from what I can tell: https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/?qt=grep&q=lgpl https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux....
    - rcthompson 11y ago
      Hmm. I suppose if you could show that the Linux kernel source files required to build zfs.ko were all LGPL, then distributing it as a binary module might actually be legal.
    - ajdlinux 11y ago
      Of the 9 commits listed there, 2 are removing LGPL headers, 2 are adding LGPL headers to scripts which aren't linked into the kernel, 1 is relicensing a header file so it can be used outside the kernel, 1 is changing from linking against an external GPL3 library to an LGPL2 library without changing the licence of the tool that's in the kernel tree, 1 is an author noting that he's bringing in some external LGPL code which he wrote and is relicensing, 1 is a commit removing a driver and noting that an LGPLed userspace replacement exists, and 1 is noting an external LGPL userspace tool in the MAINTAINERS file. So of all of those, literally 1 is changing the licence to LGPL. A better search is https://github.com/torvalds/linux/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=%22Lesser+General+Public+License%22 https://github.com/torvalds/linux/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=%2..., which reveals 147 results in the code. This is still tiny, given that the kernel is a ~20 million LOC codebase, so yes, I would call LGPL code in the kernel an unusual thing.
svckr 11y ago
For reference, here's a previous HN post with Canonicals stand on the issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11133676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11133676
alkonaut 11y ago
If I understand the issue correctly, it's not ok to distribute a Linux with a zfs binary bundled, but it is ok to distribute a Linux with the zfs sources that builds the zfs binary at install time?
- bryanlarsen 11y ago
  A rules-lawyering engineer might see one as a combined work and the other as separate works, but I highly doubt that any judge would find any difference between those two cases. IANAL.
  - alkonaut 11y ago
    That's why I'm asking -- if building from source doesn't really change anything why then even consider a difference between sources and binaries in software licenses?
    - cjbprime 11y ago
      Yes, it makes a difference. Copyright law is activated by the action of distribution -- you make something, you share it, copyright law checks whether you had permission to share it. It's legal for someone to distribute you code under one license, and someone else to separately distribute you code under a different license -- it has to be. Once you combine them on your machine, you've created something that would no longer be legal were you to distribute it. But you don't plan to distribute it, and as long as you don't do so, you haven't violated any copyright licenses, because you didn't engage in any acts of distribution for copyright law to have power over. But the distribution is on you, not the person who gave you the source. The thing they distributed wasn't violating any licenses.
      - alkonaut 11y ago
        I understand the reasoning, but I don't understand how the lines are drawn here (or how they could meaningfully be drawn). Distributing two pieces of source code with different licenses is ok. Distributing them in a way that they can trivially be combined (e.g by compiling automatically on the receiving end during installation of the latest Ubuntu) can't be considered different from a distribution where the receiver takes more manual steps to combine them. I'm curious why Canonical have to use binaries if they could easily just produce them on the clients machine and thereby not violate any copyrights? There has to be something else to it (or they just want to test the limits of the license conflict here, as a useful experiment).
ewindisch 11y ago
Torvalds indirectly made a strong case for ZFS being a not-derived work all the way back in 2003: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/linux/kernel/401977#401977 http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/linux/kernel/401977#40... He states: "having been developed totally independently of Linux: they literally were developed before Linux even existed, by people who had zero knowledge of Linux. That tends to strengthen the argument that they clearly aren't derived." He does continue to say that he believe it would be "hard to argue that any new driver or filesystem was developed without any thought of Linux", although in the specific case of ZFS (as opposed to, say, nvidia.ko), I think there would be a strong argument that the ZFS module was originally written in whole as a non-derived work. (Obviously, Linus is not the only stakeholder here, and even his own opinion may have changed since then. Still, it's not a new conversation and the community hasn't been too ruffled by the status quo for the past 13 years)
- belorn 11y ago
  Wait, what? ZFS was designed and implemented by a team at Sun led by Jeff Bonwick, Bill Moore[106] and Matthew Ahrens. It was announced on September 14, 2004,[107] but development started in 2001.[108] Source code for ZFS was integrated into the main trunk of Solaris development on October 31, 2005[28] and released as part of build 27 of OpenSolaris on November 16, 2005 In 2003, Linus could not have known about ZFS without some insight knowledge, nor if the people developing it had any knowledge about linux. It also contradict the claim that CDDL was choose for the explicit purpose to prevent ZFS being used on Linux and competing with Solaris.
  - robbyt 11y ago
    He's not talking specifically about ZFS, he's talking generally about non-GPL licensed modules and the kernel.
    - belorn 11y ago
      So: "having been developed totally (not) independently of Linux: they literally were developed (after) Linux even existed, by people who had (full) knowledge of Linux. That tends to strengthen the argument that...?" How is that a strong case for ZFS?
hnbroseph 11y ago
perhaps people should've stopped messing about with ZFS a long time ago. it's always been known that licensing problems exist, yet people toil away as if they'll magically disappear - all they do is make Oracle product offerings stronger. if Oracle is happy to attack Google, they're sure as hell fine with the much smaller Canonical.
jjawssd 11y ago
Thank you Brian Behlendorf for your hard work on integrating ZFS into the Linux ecosystem! Mad props!
xenophonf 11y ago
Why is Canonical bothering with the distribution of a binary ZFS module when building it via DKMS at install-time is already very simple (although, admittedly, time-consuming)? Their minimum system requirements, which gives the live environment plenty of resources to support compiling a kernel module, already weed out systems incapable of running ZFS. I just don't understand why Canonical's willing to take the risk of a successful copyright infringement suit involving the next Ubuntu release.
- rando3826 11y ago
  Because canonical wants to be the os of light weight vm images and docker images. You can't do that if the first step in distribution is always "boot into a separate filesystem, compile a kernel module, then reboot", and then if you want to distribute your image to anyone outside your organization, be sure to first remove that kernel module, and have them do the same process again.
  - xenophonf 11y ago
    The engineering problems are tractable even in those cases: Don't put the root file system on ZFS. Develop some kind of first-boot initrd that includes enough of a toolchain to build zfs.ko. I'm sure there are other, better ways to solve shipping ZFS in a virtual machine image, especially compared that to the legal and business risks of having a LTS release deemed a copyright infringement: Court costs, legal fees, fines, re-releasing Ubuntu, etc.
    - rando3826 11y ago
      I don't think they are tractable. They break the requirements.
billpg 11y ago
I ask having no idea... Does Linux allow for a file system to be invoked at run-time using a general-purpose interface? (If not, could one be added?) If ZFS could be modified to use the general-purpose interface, people who wanted to use it could download it and install it.
- laumars 11y ago
  Yup. It's called FUSE and ZFS is available that way as well. The problem with running file systems in the user space is that they're generally really slow since you're chucking lots more data backwards and forwards between the user space and kernel space. So kernel drivers are much preferred in this instance.
laumars 11y ago
> Sun released the Z File System (ZFS) code under the Common Development and Distribution License, version 1 (CDDLv1) as part of OpenSolaris ZFS isn't an acronym. It used to stand for Zettabyte File System (not Z File System as the article states), but like BP (formally British Petroleum), ZFS is no longer an acronym. I wouldn't normally nitpick over something like this but that statement was the first sentence under the heading "The Basic Facts" and they didn't even get it's former name right.
- ryao 11y ago
  It still stands for Zettabyte File System. That has never changed.
  - laumars 11y ago
    According to Jeff Bonwick, one of ZFS's lead developers, it did change. He discussed this point in detail (https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/en_US/entry/you_say_zeta_i_say https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/en_US/entry/you_say_zeta_i_...), however I'll just quote the last couple of paragraphs for brevity: "But zettabyte wasn't perfect, actually. We (we were a team by now) found that when you call it the zettabyte filesystem, you have to explain what a zettabyte is, and by then the elevator has reached the top floor and all people know is that you're doing large capacity. Which is true, but it's not the main point. "So we finally decided to unpimp the name back to ZFS, which doesn't stand for anything. It's just a pseudo-acronym that vaguely suggests a way to store files that gets you a lot of points in Scrabble."
    - ryao 11y ago
      I stand corrected.
shiftoutbox 11y ago
Docker Docker Docker , who cares its Ubuntu Linux
tetraverse 11y ago
"The CDDL cannot apply to the Linux kernel because zfs.ko is a self-contained file system module — the kernel itself is quite obviously not a derivative work of this new file system." https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/02/18/zfs-licensing-and-linux/ https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/02/18/zfs-licensing-and-lin...
jbandela1 11y ago
This is the kind of thing that could hurt Linux in the long term. If Linux bans non-GPL kernel modules, what of the NVidia drivers? I think most of the GPU compute code out in the world runs on NVidia GPUs. If NVidia starts pushing a BSD distro as the distro for high performance GPU computing so it would not have to deal with type of hassle, it might really change things. Also, this is coming on the heels of the big glibc vulnerability. BSD with its greater emphasis on security and less ideologicallyy driven licensing might start to look more interesting to large corporations.
- davexunit 11y ago
  Distributing a binary version of the nvidia kernel module is a GPL violation, too.
  - icedchai 11y ago
    According to whom? More accurately, some people think it is a GPL violation. There is no clear cut answer. You can get legal "opinions" either way. My personal view is that it is NOT a GPL violation. This is implied for reading the Linux source code, which explicitly allows for non GPL kernel modules.
  - edcastro 11y ago
    So my understanding is that almost all mobile makers using Android are also in the violation of GPL, since they ship blobs to support their hardware. Right? From what I see, this is just SFC trying to leverage Oracle to change it's licence manipulating public opinion because ZFS is something the "public" wants.
- legulere 11y ago
  It's just openBSD that has a greater emphasis on security. FreeBSD didn't have alsr until 2013
dognotdog 11y ago
The amount of collective brainpower being burned on licensing issues for supposedly free (as in speech) software is astonishing. I do symphatize with the sentiment that an author does not want his work to be a source of illicit gains for someone else, etc, neither do I, but at the same time find that the usefulness of a piece of code for other open source developers is (figuratively) inversely proportional to the length of the license, while the real abusers don't give a damn.
Licenser 11y ago
I find it interesting that the SFConservancy argues 'Oracle has a magic wand to make this all go away' by re-licensing ZFS but completely ignores that just as much they could re-license the kernel under a CDDL compatible license. Given that Linux (in the broader sense) is asking for something it'd sound more reasonable for them to accomodate the other parties demands. What they do is like saying "Hey I want to buy your house, what you don't want to sell it? How about you make it cheaper then so I can afford it!"
- hyperion2010 11y ago
  Um... re-licensing the kernel at this point has been deemed completely impossible [0]. 0. https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1774/why-does-linux-still-use-the-gplv2 https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1774/why-does...
  - ipalreadytaken 11y ago
    Um... If they really cared about making a quality product they would fix their existing problems, including their (apparently) poor choice of a license. Just because it is hard doesn't mean their shouldn't fix it.
    - hyperion2010 11y ago
      It's not that it is hard, it is that there are literally thousands of contributors that have contributed code under a gplv2 license that would have to be hunted down and consulted about any license change. I'm sure if you're up for it they would be happy to have someone give it a shot so that if a re-license was needed in the future they could do it, but right now there is simply no way to legally re-license the code without spending thousands of hours getting people to sign little pieces of paper that could be used improving the kernel (zfs or no).
      - ipalreadytaken 11y ago
        Right. So hard? Its a lot of work that is unplesant and nobody wants to do, I think that qualifies as "hard". I do agree its impractical, but it seems that for something as important as a function, working file system (and don't suggest that butterface fs is a production ready alternative) that somebody would put in the work to make it happen. After all the file system is everything, if you can't safely store your data, whats the point?
alblue 11y ago
This raises a whole bunch of questions, and none of the answers are good: - What's the difference between zfs and nvidia as binary blobs in the kernel? Either they are both incompatible on principle or they are not. - If the file system just uses standard kernel file system APIs then isn't it LGPL rather than GPL as per the exported symbols? - Given that relicencing either ZFS or Linux are prohibitively impractical what exactly is the point of assuming that may happen? - Who exactly complained about this? AFAIK the software conservancy doesn't have code themselves in the two products - If it goes to court the GPL may be harmed due to courts not understanding the difference between static and dynamic linking; who wins then? It seems like the beginning of the mother of nobody wins, and very little upside in any case.
leni536 11y ago
So the only people that could sue based on this supposed GPL violation are the copyright holders of the Linux kernel, right? I doubt that they have the intention to do that.
- grifferz 11y ago
  Several copyright holders have assigned their copyright to SFC, so SFC can act on their behalf. There is also at least one copyright holder that is unhappy about Canonical distributing ZFS with the kernel: https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/700074164435091456 https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/700074164435091456

252 points by dwc 11y ago

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

It is my understanding that Sun's lawyers originally created the CDDL to be GPL-incompatible, with the specific desire that code under that license should not be able to aid their then-competitor, Linux. How Canonical can suddenly decide that Sun's lawyers were wrong about this, I don't know. I suspect wishful thinking.

the_mitsuhiko 11y ago
> It is my understanding that Sun's lawyers originally created the CDDL to be GPL-incompatible, with the specific desire that code under that license should not be able to aid their then-competitor, Linux. Schwartz (or Sun under Schwartz) was not a fan of the GPL. As far as I remember they were hoping that Linux and OpenSolaris would together somehow migrate to an imaginary GPLv3 that never happened.
- yuhong 11y ago
  "Jonathan Schwartz" is the correct name for the former CEO you are referring to.
  - hnbroseph 11y ago
    they mention Schwartz... was there an edit?
    - yuhong 11y ago
      Yes.
- baldfat 11y ago
  http://www.cnet.com/news/sun-criticizes-popular-open-source-license/ http://www.cnet.com/news/sun-criticizes-popular-open-source-... This is an article on the GPL with SUN QUOTE: "Schwartz singled out the GPL provision that says source code may be mixed with other code only if the other code also is governed by the GPL. That provision is intended to create a body of software that must remain liberated from proprietary constraints. But Schwartz said that some people he's spoken to dislike it because it precludes them from using open-source software as a foundation for proprietary projects."
  - gillianseed 11y ago
    And then he went and released Java under the GPL.
DominoTree 11y ago
I believe that Bryan Cantrill has stated that it was surprising to the people at Sun when outside parties didn't start incorporating ZFS and other technologies into Linux, because the original intention when the CDDL was written was not to be GPL-incompatible. Edit: dwrensha posted a related comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11176361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11176361) with a YouTube link of Bryan making the statement.
- Dylan16807 11y ago
  If that was the intent, is it not something that can be clarified and fix the problem? Or did they screw up too badly and it's unambiguously incompatible no matter what they say?
  - DominoTree 11y ago
    It may be the case that now there's simply nobody who cares in a position to actually get it fixed
    - gherkin0 11y ago
      Yeah. If there's an unintended license-compatibility problem, the people who'd need to fix it are Oracle's lawyers. They might have a different attitude towards Open Source than Sun, to put it mildly.
      - Dylan16807 11y ago
        Wouldn't a clarification of intent be based on evidence from the people that created the license? It doesn't matter what the lawyers think, they can't change history. You'd need the lawyers to relicense, a completely different way to solve the issue.
        lmm 11y ago
        Intent and two dollars will get you a cup of coffee. The court will read the license that was written, not the one that Sun intended to write.
dwrensha 11y ago
As a counterpoint, here's a 2011 video of Bryan Cantrill claiming that it is "emphatically not the case" that the CDDL was specifically developed to be GPL-incompatible: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=1375 https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=1375
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- awalton 11y ago
  It may not have been the "original intention" of the license, for whatever value of "original intention" that means, but it certainly was used for exactly this purpose - to keep the code out of Linux. Whether or not it was just a "happy accident" the CDDL was not GPL compatible, or whether it was engineered to be that way, I believe is mostly a moot point. (Though I'm still nowhere near believing Bryan Cantrill on this point. The executives and lawyers could have easily done this without the software developers involved ever knowing until after the fact.) The GPL incompatibility was a well known fact before both of those tools were released, and it's frankly unbelievable this point wasn't raised internally at Sun before OpenSolaris walked out the door, given how much public discussion went into the license after it was first announced. The Sun executives knew exactly what they were doing when they chose that specific license for distributing D-Trace and ZFS.
  - bcantrill 11y ago
    I think all concerned (executives, lawyers, engineers) were simply trying to do the right thing by our source base, Sun's customers and the budding OpenSolaris community -- we really weren't trying to placate (or alienate) the Linux community, and didn't really factor in how the Linux community perceived its own license. As for OpenSolaris, there were a couple of constraints with respect to the GPL: first, we didn't want to dual license (i.e., GPL + something else), because that was a mess that could lead to a license-based fork -- something we definitely wanted to avoid. Second, there was great concern about simply using the GPL because of exactly the ambiguity that's highlighted here: in 2005, we had many independent hardware vendors that had entirely proprietary Solaris drivers -- it was important to us that those be allowed to stay proprietary. We all liked the BSD license, but we also liked the idea of a weak copyleft -- and in that regard, the license that best captured what we were after was the MPL, despite some (minor) issues too that needed to be cleaned up. In the end, this is what we did (the CDDL is really just a cleaned up MPL) -- but (to be clear, and for what feels like the millionth time) we did it because of what we were trying to do for our own software and community, not because we were somehow trying to punish Linux. As I've said before, one of my most vivid memories of the whole process was immediately after we launched OpenSolaris, standing in the conference room where we had just hit the carriage return, chatting with Chris Nadan from Sun Legal. We were both wondering aloud how long it would take for DTrace to show up in Linux -- but not from the perspective of license compatibility: we both accepted as a given that Linux would either view the licenses as compatible enough or wouldn't care about any incompatibility (after all, this is years after NVIDIA's binary drivers). Our only discussion was how much members of the Linux community would care about DTrace and how difficult the port would be technically. I remember saying that "maybe it will be two months, and maybe as long as two years." Of course, it was only a month or so later that SystemTap emerged from Red Hat -- and it became clear that Not-Invented-Here Syndrome would prove to be a much stronger force than any technical desire to assimilate DTrace or ZFS into Linux...

LeoPanthera 11y ago

I was not aware of the subtleties regarding the ZFS license. Would it be possible (read: legal) for someone to modify the ZFS source to be more easily buildable into the Linux kernel, but then distribute it as source code only, such that an end user can build a ZFS-enabled Linux kernel on their own? Surely as long as the end user didn't distribute the resulting kernel, that would be OK? Edit: I see that this has been done. Thanks. :)

teddyh 11y ago
The article states that Debian does this, and gives a link: http://blog.halon.org.uk/2016/01/on-zfs-in-debian/ http://blog.halon.org.uk/2016/01/on-zfs-in-debian/
dmm 11y ago
> Would it be possible (read: legal) for someone to modify the ZFS source to be more easily buildable into the Linux kernel, but then distribute it as source code only Yes and that has been done. The ZFS on Linux[0] distributes a DKMS source package that each user of ZoL uses to build a binary kernel module. DKMS automatically builds the module without manual interaction from the user, similarly to installing a regular binary package. This is legal but the resulting kernel/zfs module is non-redistributable. [0] http://zfsonlinux.org/ http://zfsonlinux.org/
- belovedeagle 11y ago
  Indeed, it's possible and even mostly-supported (at least on Gentoo) to compile the code into the kernel; i.e., not as a module. I have a zfs system without kmod support (reduces a huge attack surface and just seems cleaner).

mankash666 11y ago

This article somehow implies a moral obligation on Oracle's behalf to either modify their licence or code to be gpl compliant. I sincerely hope they don't as the GPL brigade is getting louder in their intolerance of other licences.

chimeracoder 11y ago
> the GPL brigade is getting louder in their intolerance of other licences. I really don't see much evidence of this, certainly not from the FSF/SFC, who specifically do not discourage use of free licenses that are GPL-compatible, such as the BSD and MIT licenses[0]. The anti-GPL crowd is much more vocal about their distaste for the GPL, especially on forums like HN. The issue at hand is the use of a license which is not compatible with the GPL. No matter which way you slice it, that's a massive inconvenience to everyone, and pretty much nobody wins as a result. (As for relicensing, it is literally impossible to change the license of Linux at this point, because the rights are held by thousands of contributors individually (some of whom are dead, and tracking copyright as it passes across estates is a notoriously difficult task[1]). If there's ever going to be a reconciliation between ZFS and Linux, it would require Oracle to relicense ZFS under any one of the many GPL-compatible licenses.) [0] They do, incidentally, discourage the use of the terms "BSD license" and "MIT license", arguing that those are ambiguous and should be deprecated in favor of "3-clause BSD license" and "X11 license", respectively. But that has nothing to do with the discussion at hand, which is about the use of the actual licenses themselves and the terms they represent, not the names that people use to call them. [1] Even figuring out if a given book can be reprinted is prohibitively difficult for publishers, and that's with works that only have one single author.
- Sleaker 11y ago
  I think you got it backwards, the massive inconvenience for everyone is that Linux is using the GPL and people don't want to have to deal with all the re-licensing compatibility bullshit just to be able to distribute a binary of some other FOSS. seriously, CDDL is FSF/OSI approved. Sure, Oracle could resolve it by switching to a GPL compatible license, but the problem is not oracle's clearly free software. The problem is GPL forcibly does not allow perfectly fine open source licensed software to be distributed in binary form due to it's copyleft.

kevin_b_er 11y ago

Even if we ignore the ZFS license itself, the SF Conservancy appears to be arguing that _all_ proprietary kernel modules are GPL violations.

bryanlarsen 11y ago
Exactly. They're arguing the combined work clause, which would automatically rule out all binary-only modules, such as nvidia.ko. Most previous arguments about zfs.ko were about the derived work clause, which is much more grey. I belive that nvidia.ko would be more likely to be ruled a derived work than ZFS.ko, but that's hard to tell. It does seem silly to argue about ZFS in this context. ZFS is open source and much less offensive to kernel developers than nvidia.ko.[1] If nvidia.ko is fine, then so is zfs.ko. If nvidia.ko isn't fine, zfs.ko may or may not be fine. Ubuntu has been shipping nvidia.ko for years. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ
- snuxoll 11y ago
  Of course the argument to be had here is OpenZFS lives completely independent of the Linux kernel, it runs on Illumos and FreeBSD and the availability of a Linux kernel module in no way makes or breaks the project. As such, is it a derived work since it is not dependent on the Linux kernel to exist? This is the argument the Illumos developers make about including the GPL'ed KVM code, KVM does not depend on Illumos to exist, as such does loading the KVM module into an Illumos kernel constitute a derived work? Conveniently, this is also precedent that could be set during the VMWare case the SFC is also perusing - we could either see ZFS relegated to being available anywhere but Linux and binary kernel modules totally banned (bad for nVidia, good for AMD), or a total change in the landscape of open source licensing (for better or worse).
- cjbprime 11y ago
  > Ubuntu has been shipping nvidia.ko for years. Is that true? I thought Ubuntu's support for nvidia.ko involved downloading source code to the local machine and compiling it there, to avoid distributing a GPL violation.
- 11y ago

devit 11y ago

Why isn't Canonical using btrfs? (which is supposed to provide many or all of the features that one would want to use ZFS for, and is GPLed)

DominoTree 11y ago
Because it still doesn't have the stability and maturity of ZFS (which has seen over a decade of production use)
- LeoPanthera 11y ago
  OpenSUSE is using it for root, so I assume they think it is stable enough. (Interestingly, they use XFS for /home)
  - DominoTree 11y ago
    Yeah, but is anybody using OpenSUSE? :P Edit: Wow, I just checked DistroWatch and they've been #4 for some time now...
    - snuxoll 11y ago
      There's a lot of interest in OpenSUSE tumbleweed from what I've gathered.
    - j_koreth 11y ago
      There are more continents using linux than America ;)
    - lmm 11y ago
      Most of Europe. At times it feels like there are almost parallel OSS ecosystems on the two sides of the Atlantic.
  - ewzimm 11y ago
    I'm using openSUSE Leap with a default partition scheme, and it's btrfs all the way down to home.

dsp1234 11y ago

in this context, Oracle could make everyone's life easier by waving their magic relicensing wand. Well, so could the linux developers by relicensing to MIT. That's not much of an argument. Additionally, I'd still love to see an actual court case with regards to the GPL here. Licensing is always murky, because almost none of it has been tested directly in the courts. Thus the only legal opinions we have are from people who have a vested interest in the outcome one way or another. Let a court solve it once and for all please. In particular, I'd love to have a 100% lock on whether a binary module that links to the kernel is actually a derivative work or not.

ajross 11y ago
The "linux developers" aren't a single entity. You'd need a separate release from theoretically every copyright holder (or a really good legal argument for a subset that defines all the conflicting APIs). The point here was practical, not moral. Linux, in practice, can't relicense the kernel. Oracle, in practice, can relicense ZFS. Thus the "magic wand" comment.
- dsp1234 11y ago
  Does Oracle own the code for all of the existent OpenZFS code that Canonical imported? If not, then doesn't there exist the same issue that all of the developers would also need to relicense?
  - ori_b 11y ago
    Companies generally require copyright assignment.
  - ajross 11y ago
    Arrgh. The same issue in principle, but not in practice. "All the developers" of OpenZFS are Oracle Corporation, plus a few dozen other folks we can grep from the commit log. And if they don't consent and Oracle does, surely the community can duplicate the effort quickly. In practice (that word again) all the meaningful copyright to ZFS sits inside Oracle headquarters. It's just not the same. (Also, as another poster points out, it's possible that all OpenZFS copyright is already assigned to Oracle -- I have no particular knowledge)

ikeboy 11y ago

GPLv2 contains the line >This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. So couldn't the FSF fix this by releasing a later version of the GPL that allows for this combination? https://www.gnu.org/licenses/rms-why-gplv3.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/rms-why-gplv3.html seems to imply that that wouldn't work, but I don't understand why. Can someone with more experience with the GPLs enlighten me?

snuxoll 11y ago
Linus removed that line from the kernel license because he disagreed with the tivoization clause in GPLv3, so the Linux kernel will forever remain GPLv2.
- davexunit 11y ago
  GPLv3 was not released until 2007. AFAIK, Linux has been GPLv2-only since it started using GPLv2 in the 90s.
  - snuxoll 11y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU - he telegraphed GPLv3 many, many years in advance - just because it wasn't published until 2007 doesn't mean there wasn't talk about it for a long time before then.
- bryanlarsen 11y ago
  Linus removed that line before GPLv3 was created because he didn't want to give the FSF the ability to arbitrarily relicense his work to a license that he didn't have a chance to vet. If he liked the GPLv3 he may have added the line back in, but he hasn't done so for the reason you mentioned.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago

dragonwriter 11y ago

I think what's cute is the part where they point out why citing lawyer's (especially those employed by interested parties) opinions is not helpful because of the biases lawyers have to aggressively represent the interest of their parties, such that their opinions will generally reflect not the most likely correct view of the law but the view of the law most favorable to the interests of their clients -- and then, in the next paragraph, proceed to present their lawyers' opinion of the key and fundamental determining factor in the situation. Which, of course -- as they've just telegraphed -- reflects SFConservancy's vested interests in a maximalist interpretation of what is a "derived work", since that is what maximizes the scope of works to which the necessity to adhere to a license (like the GPL) applies.

FireBeyond 11y ago
What I'm really curious to find out is who Ubuntu talked to - the original discussions of this had Canonical saying they consulted "industry's leading software freedom legal counsel". "There are as many opinions as there are lawyers. You just have to find the one you need."
- dsp1234 11y ago
  That's a good question. Apparently Debian got the ok from the Software Freedom Law Center[0], but they distribute it as source only, and the binary is built on the end user's computer (and they consider it then unredistributable). This is different than what Canonical is claiming to do which is to generate the binary themselves. [0] - https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/04/msg00006.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/04/msg00...
geofft 11y ago
They're pretty clear about their own biases (e.g., they provide legal advice to Debian, they're involved with the VMware suit). But more importantly, they are pretty clear that they believe their lawyers' opinion to be the majority one among lawyers who have thought about this question: "Canonical has found some lawyers who disagree — a minority position, from our understanding of community norms."

Sanddancer 11y ago

At this point, oracle can't wave their magic wand, as the SFC implies, and have the software be magically gpl-compatible. Since Oracle re-closed solaris, a lot of other entities have branched and forked and merged code into the openzfs codebase under the cddl. So you'd have to get in contact with all those entities to get it relicensed, unless you want to work on an ancient version of ZFS.

carussell 11y ago
Not true. It doesn't matter who owns the copyright, because Sun has the keys to the kingdom and can publish a revision to the CDDL whenever they want. Forward compatibility is not something you opt-in to with the CDDL (unlike you have to do with the GPL). This is, for example, how Mozilla has been relicensed to MPL 2.0 from earlier versions of the license—which the CDDL is based on, incidentally—even though there are no "any later version" notices anywhere in the headers or other files.

hoistor 11y ago

Am I missing something obvious here? Is it a GPL violation to create a separate .deb which includes only the binary kernel module for zfs which can be simply apt-get'd? Or are canonical planning on including the zfs code in the base 'kernel-blabla' package? If the latter, why not just have a sep package for the module? I imagine you'll need to install some 'zfs' package to get the userland tools anyway ?

rcthompson 11y ago
The single "zfs.ko" file that contains the ZFS kernel module is derived from both the ZFS sources and the Linux kernel sources, because you need the Linux kernel sources to link a module with the Linux kernel. (Actually I think you just need the headers, but those are GPLv2 anyway, so the distinction is irrelevant.)
- josteink 11y ago
  Actually they are LGPL, according to other posts in this thread. Which would make it perfectly OK. I'm not well enough traversed in the kernel source to find a direct reference but you see commits like this every now and then: https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=09a77a885233e2a20dac2635a79c83ccf50a26a1 https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.... Having parts of the kernel LGPLed doesn't seem like an unusual or odd thing, from what I can tell: https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/?qt=grep&q=lgpl https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux....
  - rcthompson 11y ago
    Hmm. I suppose if you could show that the Linux kernel source files required to build zfs.ko were all LGPL, then distributing it as a binary module might actually be legal.
  - ajdlinux 11y ago
    Of the 9 commits listed there, 2 are removing LGPL headers, 2 are adding LGPL headers to scripts which aren't linked into the kernel, 1 is relicensing a header file so it can be used outside the kernel, 1 is changing from linking against an external GPL3 library to an LGPL2 library without changing the licence of the tool that's in the kernel tree, 1 is an author noting that he's bringing in some external LGPL code which he wrote and is relicensing, 1 is a commit removing a driver and noting that an LGPLed userspace replacement exists, and 1 is noting an external LGPL userspace tool in the MAINTAINERS file. So of all of those, literally 1 is changing the licence to LGPL. A better search is https://github.com/torvalds/linux/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=%22Lesser+General+Public+License%22 https://github.com/torvalds/linux/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=%2..., which reveals 147 results in the code. This is still tiny, given that the kernel is a ~20 million LOC codebase, so yes, I would call LGPL code in the kernel an unusual thing.

svckr 11y ago

For reference, here's a previous HN post with Canonicals stand on the issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11133676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11133676

alkonaut 11y ago

If I understand the issue correctly, it's not ok to distribute a Linux with a zfs binary bundled, but it is ok to distribute a Linux with the zfs sources that builds the zfs binary at install time?

bryanlarsen 11y ago
A rules-lawyering engineer might see one as a combined work and the other as separate works, but I highly doubt that any judge would find any difference between those two cases. IANAL.
- alkonaut 11y ago
  That's why I'm asking -- if building from source doesn't really change anything why then even consider a difference between sources and binaries in software licenses?
  - cjbprime 11y ago
    Yes, it makes a difference. Copyright law is activated by the action of distribution -- you make something, you share it, copyright law checks whether you had permission to share it. It's legal for someone to distribute you code under one license, and someone else to separately distribute you code under a different license -- it has to be. Once you combine them on your machine, you've created something that would no longer be legal were you to distribute it. But you don't plan to distribute it, and as long as you don't do so, you haven't violated any copyright licenses, because you didn't engage in any acts of distribution for copyright law to have power over. But the distribution is on you, not the person who gave you the source. The thing they distributed wasn't violating any licenses.
    - alkonaut 11y ago
      I understand the reasoning, but I don't understand how the lines are drawn here (or how they could meaningfully be drawn). Distributing two pieces of source code with different licenses is ok. Distributing them in a way that they can trivially be combined (e.g by compiling automatically on the receiving end during installation of the latest Ubuntu) can't be considered different from a distribution where the receiver takes more manual steps to combine them. I'm curious why Canonical have to use binaries if they could easily just produce them on the clients machine and thereby not violate any copyrights? There has to be something else to it (or they just want to test the limits of the license conflict here, as a useful experiment).

ewindisch 11y ago

Torvalds indirectly made a strong case for ZFS being a not-derived work all the way back in 2003: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/linux/kernel/401977#401977 http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/linux/kernel/401977#40... He states: "having been developed totally independently of Linux: they literally were developed before Linux even existed, by people who had zero knowledge of Linux. That tends to strengthen the argument that they clearly aren't derived." He does continue to say that he believe it would be "hard to argue that any new driver or filesystem was developed without any thought of Linux", although in the specific case of ZFS (as opposed to, say, nvidia.ko), I think there would be a strong argument that the ZFS module was originally written in whole as a non-derived work. (Obviously, Linus is not the only stakeholder here, and even his own opinion may have changed since then. Still, it's not a new conversation and the community hasn't been too ruffled by the status quo for the past 13 years)

belorn 11y ago
Wait, what? ZFS was designed and implemented by a team at Sun led by Jeff Bonwick, Bill Moore[106] and Matthew Ahrens. It was announced on September 14, 2004,[107] but development started in 2001.[108] Source code for ZFS was integrated into the main trunk of Solaris development on October 31, 2005[28] and released as part of build 27 of OpenSolaris on November 16, 2005 In 2003, Linus could not have known about ZFS without some insight knowledge, nor if the people developing it had any knowledge about linux. It also contradict the claim that CDDL was choose for the explicit purpose to prevent ZFS being used on Linux and competing with Solaris.
- robbyt 11y ago
  He's not talking specifically about ZFS, he's talking generally about non-GPL licensed modules and the kernel.
  - belorn 11y ago
    So: "having been developed totally (not) independently of Linux: they literally were developed (after) Linux even existed, by people who had (full) knowledge of Linux. That tends to strengthen the argument that...?" How is that a strong case for ZFS?

hnbroseph 11y ago

perhaps people should've stopped messing about with ZFS a long time ago. it's always been known that licensing problems exist, yet people toil away as if they'll magically disappear - all they do is make Oracle product offerings stronger. if Oracle is happy to attack Google, they're sure as hell fine with the much smaller Canonical.

jjawssd 11y ago

Thank you Brian Behlendorf for your hard work on integrating ZFS into the Linux ecosystem! Mad props!

xenophonf 11y ago

Why is Canonical bothering with the distribution of a binary ZFS module when building it via DKMS at install-time is already very simple (although, admittedly, time-consuming)? Their minimum system requirements, which gives the live environment plenty of resources to support compiling a kernel module, already weed out systems incapable of running ZFS. I just don't understand why Canonical's willing to take the risk of a successful copyright infringement suit involving the next Ubuntu release.

rando3826 11y ago
Because canonical wants to be the os of light weight vm images and docker images. You can't do that if the first step in distribution is always "boot into a separate filesystem, compile a kernel module, then reboot", and then if you want to distribute your image to anyone outside your organization, be sure to first remove that kernel module, and have them do the same process again.
- xenophonf 11y ago
  The engineering problems are tractable even in those cases: Don't put the root file system on ZFS. Develop some kind of first-boot initrd that includes enough of a toolchain to build zfs.ko. I'm sure there are other, better ways to solve shipping ZFS in a virtual machine image, especially compared that to the legal and business risks of having a LTS release deemed a copyright infringement: Court costs, legal fees, fines, re-releasing Ubuntu, etc.
  - rando3826 11y ago
    I don't think they are tractable. They break the requirements.

billpg 11y ago

I ask having no idea... Does Linux allow for a file system to be invoked at run-time using a general-purpose interface? (If not, could one be added?) If ZFS could be modified to use the general-purpose interface, people who wanted to use it could download it and install it.

laumars 11y ago
Yup. It's called FUSE and ZFS is available that way as well. The problem with running file systems in the user space is that they're generally really slow since you're chucking lots more data backwards and forwards between the user space and kernel space. So kernel drivers are much preferred in this instance.

laumars 11y ago

> Sun released the Z File System (ZFS) code under the Common Development and Distribution License, version 1 (CDDLv1) as part of OpenSolaris ZFS isn't an acronym. It used to stand for Zettabyte File System (not Z File System as the article states), but like BP (formally British Petroleum), ZFS is no longer an acronym. I wouldn't normally nitpick over something like this but that statement was the first sentence under the heading "The Basic Facts" and they didn't even get it's former name right.

ryao 11y ago
It still stands for Zettabyte File System. That has never changed.
- laumars 11y ago
  According to Jeff Bonwick, one of ZFS's lead developers, it did change. He discussed this point in detail (https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/en_US/entry/you_say_zeta_i_say https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/en_US/entry/you_say_zeta_i_...), however I'll just quote the last couple of paragraphs for brevity: "But zettabyte wasn't perfect, actually. We (we were a team by now) found that when you call it the zettabyte filesystem, you have to explain what a zettabyte is, and by then the elevator has reached the top floor and all people know is that you're doing large capacity. Which is true, but it's not the main point. "So we finally decided to unpimp the name back to ZFS, which doesn't stand for anything. It's just a pseudo-acronym that vaguely suggests a way to store files that gets you a lot of points in Scrabble."
  - ryao 11y ago
    I stand corrected.

shiftoutbox 11y ago

Docker Docker Docker , who cares its Ubuntu Linux

tetraverse 11y ago

"The CDDL cannot apply to the Linux kernel because zfs.ko is a self-contained file system module — the kernel itself is quite obviously not a derivative work of this new file system." https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/02/18/zfs-licensing-and-linux/ https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/02/18/zfs-licensing-and-lin...

jbandela1 11y ago

This is the kind of thing that could hurt Linux in the long term. If Linux bans non-GPL kernel modules, what of the NVidia drivers? I think most of the GPU compute code out in the world runs on NVidia GPUs. If NVidia starts pushing a BSD distro as the distro for high performance GPU computing so it would not have to deal with type of hassle, it might really change things. Also, this is coming on the heels of the big glibc vulnerability. BSD with its greater emphasis on security and less ideologicallyy driven licensing might start to look more interesting to large corporations.

davexunit 11y ago
Distributing a binary version of the nvidia kernel module is a GPL violation, too.
- icedchai 11y ago
  According to whom? More accurately, some people think it is a GPL violation. There is no clear cut answer. You can get legal "opinions" either way. My personal view is that it is NOT a GPL violation. This is implied for reading the Linux source code, which explicitly allows for non GPL kernel modules.
- edcastro 11y ago
  So my understanding is that almost all mobile makers using Android are also in the violation of GPL, since they ship blobs to support their hardware. Right? From what I see, this is just SFC trying to leverage Oracle to change it's licence manipulating public opinion because ZFS is something the "public" wants.
legulere 11y ago
It's just openBSD that has a greater emphasis on security. FreeBSD didn't have alsr until 2013

dognotdog 11y ago

The amount of collective brainpower being burned on licensing issues for supposedly free (as in speech) software is astonishing. I do symphatize with the sentiment that an author does not want his work to be a source of illicit gains for someone else, etc, neither do I, but at the same time find that the usefulness of a piece of code for other open source developers is (figuratively) inversely proportional to the length of the license, while the real abusers don't give a damn.

Licenser 11y ago

I find it interesting that the SFConservancy argues 'Oracle has a magic wand to make this all go away' by re-licensing ZFS but completely ignores that just as much they could re-license the kernel under a CDDL compatible license. Given that Linux (in the broader sense) is asking for something it'd sound more reasonable for them to accomodate the other parties demands. What they do is like saying "Hey I want to buy your house, what you don't want to sell it? How about you make it cheaper then so I can afford it!"

hyperion2010 11y ago
Um... re-licensing the kernel at this point has been deemed completely impossible [0]. 0. https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1774/why-does-linux-still-use-the-gplv2 https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1774/why-does...
- ipalreadytaken 11y ago
  Um... If they really cared about making a quality product they would fix their existing problems, including their (apparently) poor choice of a license. Just because it is hard doesn't mean their shouldn't fix it.
  - hyperion2010 11y ago
    It's not that it is hard, it is that there are literally thousands of contributors that have contributed code under a gplv2 license that would have to be hunted down and consulted about any license change. I'm sure if you're up for it they would be happy to have someone give it a shot so that if a re-license was needed in the future they could do it, but right now there is simply no way to legally re-license the code without spending thousands of hours getting people to sign little pieces of paper that could be used improving the kernel (zfs or no).
    - ipalreadytaken 11y ago
      Right. So hard? Its a lot of work that is unplesant and nobody wants to do, I think that qualifies as "hard". I do agree its impractical, but it seems that for something as important as a function, working file system (and don't suggest that butterface fs is a production ready alternative) that somebody would put in the work to make it happen. After all the file system is everything, if you can't safely store your data, whats the point?

alblue 11y ago

This raises a whole bunch of questions, and none of the answers are good: - What's the difference between zfs and nvidia as binary blobs in the kernel? Either they are both incompatible on principle or they are not. - If the file system just uses standard kernel file system APIs then isn't it LGPL rather than GPL as per the exported symbols? - Given that relicencing either ZFS or Linux are prohibitively impractical what exactly is the point of assuming that may happen? - Who exactly complained about this? AFAIK the software conservancy doesn't have code themselves in the two products - If it goes to court the GPL may be harmed due to courts not understanding the difference between static and dynamic linking; who wins then? It seems like the beginning of the mother of nobody wins, and very little upside in any case.

leni536 11y ago

So the only people that could sue based on this supposed GPL violation are the copyright holders of the Linux kernel, right? I doubt that they have the intention to do that.

grifferz 11y ago
Several copyright holders have assigned their copyright to SFC, so SFC can act on their behalf. There is also at least one copyright holder that is unhappy about Canonical distributing ZFS with the kernel: https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/700074164435091456 https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/700074164435091456