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In the case of Linux, Linus has a public position [1] that: * A kernel module is run by the kernel, not incorporated in it, * A kernel module only uses LGPL i

In the case of Linux, Linus has a public position [1] that: * A kernel module is run by the kernel, not incorporated in it, * A kernel module only uses LGPL interfaces, so full GPL compliance shouldn't be necessary, * Binary modules should be legal (though he doesn't like them), and * Projects (like filesystems developed for other platforms) with their own life outside of Linux shouldn't be required to re-license if they clearly weren't based on Linux. I know Linus doesn't represent all kernel developers, but his opinion should carry a lot of weight. The SFConservancy is just practicing GPL overreach here, and is rattling a saber in hopes that Oracle blinks. Ubuntu has been distributing NVidia binary kernel modules for years and this hasn't resulted in a lawsuit, so it seems like an empty threat. [1] http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Kernel/proprietary-kernel-modules.html http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Kernel/proprietary-kernel-modules....

carussell 11y ago
> his opinion should carry a lot of weight That's nice, but it's only one side. What about the opinion of the developers who wrote the module and licensed it under CDDL? The incompatibility between CDDL and GPL is well-known, and the authors at Sun made it that way deliberately. It's not kosher to just say, "Well the authors of the GPL software are okay with it, so it's fine." You need to respect the wishes of the developers who contributed the CDDL code to begin with.
- rosser 11y ago
  Something tells me it wasn't the developers at Sun who chose the CDDL for ZFS.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- SomeCallMeTim 11y ago
  There's evidence there was no intent: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11176361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11176361 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11176339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11176339
  - carussell 11y ago
    Well Danese Cooper, who wrote the thing, said she was deliberately made to author it to be incompatible. I don't understand this line of reasoning, where somebody can say, "person A at Sun says it was intentional", then somebody else says, "person B at Sun says it wasn't intentional", and then acts as if that settles the matter. All it means is that there's contention about it at best. ... and whether it was intentional or not doesn't affect what the text actually says.
    - SomeCallMeTim 11y ago
      The other reply [1] nails the real point: No one at Oracle is complaining. If they were, then one could care about their POV. You also ignore the binary kernel object point: Nvidia's drivers are completely proprietary and closed source. How is that in any way less of a violation? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11177128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11177128
      - carussell 11y ago
        There's lots to respond to in this comment, but I'm going to go away and come back to see if anyone else steps in to address them. I don't want to seem like I'm trying to dominate the conversation. (In the meantime, please see my other comments.)
        deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      - Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd 11y ago
        > If they were, then one could care about their POV. Oracle isn't exactly known for their attempts at fostering good-will with the open source community. Considering that, I don't think they have much incentive to complain now, even if their lawyers are 100% sure that there is a violation of their copyright. Instead they can just wait for Canonical to hang themselves, then sue them and their customers for the fair market value plus damages. (Maybe they'll offer Canonical's customers a good deal when they switch to Oracle Linux.)
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  The owners of CDDL-licensed code aren't complaining about a CDDL violation. It's only certain GPL advocates and licensors complaining of a GPL violation. Certainly Oracle, Sun's legal successor, hasn't publicly complained.
  - carussell 11y ago
    > The owners of CDDL-licensed code aren't complaining about a CDDL violation That may be true for the authors of ZFS (and I don't know that it is, but we can agree to accept that it might be true). There are people, though, that when looking for a license to use when releasing their software specifically choose one that is known to be incompatible with the GPL. Among them are people who go with the CDDL. Saying that we should ignore the license text and treat the CDDL as compatible affects more than just the authors of the project we're talking about. And if the authors of the code in question are really okay with it being combined with the GPL, then at any time they can make that explicit offering it under a license that is widely accepted to be compatible.
    - cthalupa 11y ago
      Are you arguing that the licensing requirements of the CDDL are the problem here? To the best of my knowledge (though I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice) that is not the case. My understanding is that what Canonical is doing here is not a violation of any CDDL licensing terms, and the legal question is purely of whether or not it is a violation of GPL license terms.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      > That may be true for the authors of ZFS Who are the only ones who have a legal interest in the manner in which the CDDL-licensed code at issue is used. The fact that other people issue code with a license with the same text has no bearing on anything. > Saying that we should ignore the license text and treat the CDDL as compatible affects more than just the authors of the project we're talking about. No one is saying that, the argument is that this is not legally a derived work of the GPL-licensed work, so that neither the GPL nor compatibility between the CDDL and the GPL is relevant. No one involved has argued that the CDDL is, or should be treated as, compatible with the GPL. The CDDL-licensed code is being distributed under the CDDL alone, not the GPL. That's the whole reason some people on the GPL side are complaining. I can't even see what people on the CDDL side would have to complain about under any interpretation of copyright law or either license that anyone has publicly made ever.
- rdtsc 11y ago
  > The incompatibility between CDDL and GPL is well-known, and the authors at Sun made it that way deliberately. To clarify, by "authors" do you mean individual developers? Or do you mean Sun/Oracle as a corporation. If you mean individuals, how often do you see individual developers working for multinational companies just wing it with a license choice? (If that is what you are implying). Your comment made it seem as if CDDL was a long and hard personal choice made by each developers, and somehow people here are wiling to discount that hard decision. I worked for 2 big companies and in neither case had a much of a personal choice in picking licenses for the code. As in thinking "hmm, I think this code today will be MIT, maybe tomorrow I'll feel like Public Domain". It is usually the higher ups / company owners / legal department that decides what the license is and the company as an entity owns the code. Point being ownership of the code is very concentrated with ZFS, and in this case concentrated in the hands of Oracle + a few outside developers and it is just a file system (albeit a cool one). So that is way of the quickest solution to the impasse is for Oracle to re-license the code. Of course the other fly in the ointment here is that Oracle has some stake in BTRFS -- a competing filesystem. It was project sponsored by them initially and so I think besides being, well, you know Oracle, they could be interested in stiffing adoption of ZFS to avoid competition with their own project.
- ryao 11y ago
  > What about the opinion of the developers who wrote the module and licensed it under CDDL? We are okay with it. Although ZFS developers on all open source platforms are considered OpenZFS developers, I am explicitly listed on the wiki: http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Contributors#Richard_Yao http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Contributors#Richard_Yao I am also the #2 ZFSOnLinux contributor by commit count according to github's statistics and I have maintained that position for years: https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/graphs/contributors https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/graphs/contributors If any of the other OpenZFS developers had a problem with Linux distributions shipping the OpenZFS code, I ought to have heard about that by now. So far, every OpenZFS developer on every other platform that I meet is happy that the code is available on Linux. I have even met employees at Oracle that are happy about it. While that is not an official stance of Oracle, Oracle itself publishes a dtrace module under the CDDL for use on Linux, so it would be strange to think that they would have a problem with shipping a port of the ZFS driver from the original OpenSolaris codebase under the original license for Linux, especially when it benefits Oracle Linux.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - d_b 11y ago
    You're not one of the original copyright holders.. Oracle is one of the largest copyright holders. Maybe you should stop posting legal opinions when you clearly have your own bias?
    - ryao 11y ago
      I hold copyright on a significant enough amount of the Linux port that the license cannot easily change without my consent. The same is true for at least a dozen other people/organizations, if not a few dozen. You cannot say the same about yourself. That being said, I am actively avoiding any statements that are repetitive with other comments that I have made on hacker news because they are not productive.
      - d_b 11y ago
- cyphar 11y ago
  > > his opinion should carry a lot of weight > That's nice, but it's only one side. What about the opinion of the developers who wrote the module and licensed it under CDDL? The developers' opinions don't matter. All contributors used to have to sign a CLA to give copyright to Sun. Then Sun was bought by Oracle. So you should care about what Oracle thinks about copyright infringement. > The incompatibility between CDDL and GPL is well-known, and the authors at Sun made it that way deliberately. No, that's bullshit. CDDL (which is just the MPL) is a file-based copyleft because that's what license fitted their requirements. It's not their fault that people have a completely fucked up interpretation of "derivative work" that includes any combination of two completely separately developed works.
  - csirac2 11y ago
    > It's not their fault that people have a completely fucked up interpretation of "derivative work" that includes any combination of two completely separately developed works. Indeed, "derivative work" is a well-understood term of art in Copyright law. So the courts will have to decide if that's truly what they will interpret, or will they take the redistribution & usage restrictions of the GPL as a separable matter.
  - gillianseed 11y ago
    Oh please, even the author of the CDDL license states that this is so (Danese Cooper). And it's not as if that admission was ever needed, were you even around back then ? Solaris was being killed in the market by Linux, Sun decided to go open source in an effort to better compete with Linux, but there was NO way that they would give away their prized technology (ZFS, DTrace) under a license which would allow their main competitor to whom they were losing, to integrate said technology. Hence CDDL, GPLv2 incompatible.
    - cyphar 11y ago
      > Oh please, even the author of the CDDL license states that this is so (Danese Cooper). Wikipedia mentions several other authors. Maybe Wikipedia is wrong, but I am doubtful only one person wrote the CDDL. > Solaris was being killed in the market by Linux, Sun decided to go open source in an effort to better compete with Linux, but there was NO way that they would give away their prized technology (ZFS, DTrace) under a license which would allow their main competitor to whom they were losing, to integrate said technology. That is one telling of the story. Other Sun employees have different tellings. It's not as cut and dry as you claim. CDDL is GPL incompatible in a very subtle way. The copyright of the CDDL licensed code isn't infringed, it's technically the copyright of the GPL code that's infringed. CDDL allows distribution of the binaries under a different license (provided the license doesn't restrict the users' rights, which the GPL doesn't), but the source files must always be under the same license. The GPL requires the source files for the "dervied work" be under the same license, which is where the incompatibility steps in.
protomyth 11y ago
> The SFConservancy is just practicing GPL overreach here, and is rattling a saber in hopes that Oracle blinks. Why would Oracle care? Oracle is not involved in OpenZFS and has closed source all of their changes for a while. The new code (which is a lot) is not owned by Oracle. It is owned by the individual contributors as OpenZFS is not doing copyright assignments.
- cyphar 11y ago
  > > The SFConservancy is just practicing GPL overreach here, and is rattling a saber in hopes that Oracle blinks. > Why would Oracle care? Oracle is not involved in OpenZFS and has closed source all of their changes for a while. The new code (which is a lot) is not owned by Oracle. It is owned by the individual contributors as OpenZFS is not doing copyright assignments. That's not how copyright works, and we've all seen how zealous Oracle loves to get with copyright arguments (the Android thing, for example).
  - protomyth 11y ago
    That's exactly how copyright works. Without an assignment or contract, the author owns the copyright.
    - krylon 11y ago
      This probably doesn't affect the argument one way or the other, but in Germany, if some company employs you, and you write some code as part of your work for that company, AFAIK, copyright for that code automatically belongs to the company. There are even cases where copyright for code you write after leaving the company could be considered to belong to that company.
      - protomyth 11y ago
        The basic argument is that the OpenZFS folks have not been assigning their copyrights to Oracle after the Sun buyout and are not subject to what you have encountered in Germany (which I find just wrong, sorry for your troubles). Perhaps LGPL would be a better license for an OS (might be an interesting discussion).

carussell 11y ago

> his opinion should carry a lot of weight That's nice, but it's only one side. What about the opinion of the developers who wrote the module and licensed it under CDDL? The incompatibility between CDDL and GPL is well-known, and the authors at Sun made it that way deliberately. It's not kosher to just say, "Well the authors of the GPL software are okay with it, so it's fine." You need to respect the wishes of the developers who contributed the CDDL code to begin with.

rosser 11y ago
Something tells me it wasn't the developers at Sun who chose the CDDL for ZFS.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
SomeCallMeTim 11y ago
There's evidence there was no intent: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11176361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11176361 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11176339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11176339
- carussell 11y ago
  Well Danese Cooper, who wrote the thing, said she was deliberately made to author it to be incompatible. I don't understand this line of reasoning, where somebody can say, "person A at Sun says it was intentional", then somebody else says, "person B at Sun says it wasn't intentional", and then acts as if that settles the matter. All it means is that there's contention about it at best. ... and whether it was intentional or not doesn't affect what the text actually says.
  - SomeCallMeTim 11y ago
    The other reply [1] nails the real point: No one at Oracle is complaining. If they were, then one could care about their POV. You also ignore the binary kernel object point: Nvidia's drivers are completely proprietary and closed source. How is that in any way less of a violation? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11177128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11177128
    - carussell 11y ago
      There's lots to respond to in this comment, but I'm going to go away and come back to see if anyone else steps in to address them. I don't want to seem like I'm trying to dominate the conversation. (In the meantime, please see my other comments.)
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
    - Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd 11y ago
      > If they were, then one could care about their POV. Oracle isn't exactly known for their attempts at fostering good-will with the open source community. Considering that, I don't think they have much incentive to complain now, even if their lawyers are 100% sure that there is a violation of their copyright. Instead they can just wait for Canonical to hang themselves, then sue them and their customers for the fair market value plus damages. (Maybe they'll offer Canonical's customers a good deal when they switch to Oracle Linux.)
dragonwriter 11y ago
The owners of CDDL-licensed code aren't complaining about a CDDL violation. It's only certain GPL advocates and licensors complaining of a GPL violation. Certainly Oracle, Sun's legal successor, hasn't publicly complained.
- carussell 11y ago
  > The owners of CDDL-licensed code aren't complaining about a CDDL violation That may be true for the authors of ZFS (and I don't know that it is, but we can agree to accept that it might be true). There are people, though, that when looking for a license to use when releasing their software specifically choose one that is known to be incompatible with the GPL. Among them are people who go with the CDDL. Saying that we should ignore the license text and treat the CDDL as compatible affects more than just the authors of the project we're talking about. And if the authors of the code in question are really okay with it being combined with the GPL, then at any time they can make that explicit offering it under a license that is widely accepted to be compatible.
  - cthalupa 11y ago
    Are you arguing that the licensing requirements of the CDDL are the problem here? To the best of my knowledge (though I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice) that is not the case. My understanding is that what Canonical is doing here is not a violation of any CDDL licensing terms, and the legal question is purely of whether or not it is a violation of GPL license terms.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > That may be true for the authors of ZFS Who are the only ones who have a legal interest in the manner in which the CDDL-licensed code at issue is used. The fact that other people issue code with a license with the same text has no bearing on anything. > Saying that we should ignore the license text and treat the CDDL as compatible affects more than just the authors of the project we're talking about. No one is saying that, the argument is that this is not legally a derived work of the GPL-licensed work, so that neither the GPL nor compatibility between the CDDL and the GPL is relevant. No one involved has argued that the CDDL is, or should be treated as, compatible with the GPL. The CDDL-licensed code is being distributed under the CDDL alone, not the GPL. That's the whole reason some people on the GPL side are complaining. I can't even see what people on the CDDL side would have to complain about under any interpretation of copyright law or either license that anyone has publicly made ever.
rdtsc 11y ago
> The incompatibility between CDDL and GPL is well-known, and the authors at Sun made it that way deliberately. To clarify, by "authors" do you mean individual developers? Or do you mean Sun/Oracle as a corporation. If you mean individuals, how often do you see individual developers working for multinational companies just wing it with a license choice? (If that is what you are implying). Your comment made it seem as if CDDL was a long and hard personal choice made by each developers, and somehow people here are wiling to discount that hard decision. I worked for 2 big companies and in neither case had a much of a personal choice in picking licenses for the code. As in thinking "hmm, I think this code today will be MIT, maybe tomorrow I'll feel like Public Domain". It is usually the higher ups / company owners / legal department that decides what the license is and the company as an entity owns the code. Point being ownership of the code is very concentrated with ZFS, and in this case concentrated in the hands of Oracle + a few outside developers and it is just a file system (albeit a cool one). So that is way of the quickest solution to the impasse is for Oracle to re-license the code. Of course the other fly in the ointment here is that Oracle has some stake in BTRFS -- a competing filesystem. It was project sponsored by them initially and so I think besides being, well, you know Oracle, they could be interested in stiffing adoption of ZFS to avoid competition with their own project.
ryao 11y ago
> What about the opinion of the developers who wrote the module and licensed it under CDDL? We are okay with it. Although ZFS developers on all open source platforms are considered OpenZFS developers, I am explicitly listed on the wiki: http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Contributors#Richard_Yao http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Contributors#Richard_Yao I am also the #2 ZFSOnLinux contributor by commit count according to github's statistics and I have maintained that position for years: https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/graphs/contributors https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/graphs/contributors If any of the other OpenZFS developers had a problem with Linux distributions shipping the OpenZFS code, I ought to have heard about that by now. So far, every OpenZFS developer on every other platform that I meet is happy that the code is available on Linux. I have even met employees at Oracle that are happy about it. While that is not an official stance of Oracle, Oracle itself publishes a dtrace module under the CDDL for use on Linux, so it would be strange to think that they would have a problem with shipping a port of the ZFS driver from the original OpenSolaris codebase under the original license for Linux, especially when it benefits Oracle Linux.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- d_b 11y ago
  You're not one of the original copyright holders.. Oracle is one of the largest copyright holders. Maybe you should stop posting legal opinions when you clearly have your own bias?
  - ryao 11y ago
    I hold copyright on a significant enough amount of the Linux port that the license cannot easily change without my consent. The same is true for at least a dozen other people/organizations, if not a few dozen. You cannot say the same about yourself. That being said, I am actively avoiding any statements that are repetitive with other comments that I have made on hacker news because they are not productive.
    - d_b 11y ago
cyphar 11y ago
> > his opinion should carry a lot of weight > That's nice, but it's only one side. What about the opinion of the developers who wrote the module and licensed it under CDDL? The developers' opinions don't matter. All contributors used to have to sign a CLA to give copyright to Sun. Then Sun was bought by Oracle. So you should care about what Oracle thinks about copyright infringement. > The incompatibility between CDDL and GPL is well-known, and the authors at Sun made it that way deliberately. No, that's bullshit. CDDL (which is just the MPL) is a file-based copyleft because that's what license fitted their requirements. It's not their fault that people have a completely fucked up interpretation of "derivative work" that includes any combination of two completely separately developed works.
- csirac2 11y ago
  > It's not their fault that people have a completely fucked up interpretation of "derivative work" that includes any combination of two completely separately developed works. Indeed, "derivative work" is a well-understood term of art in Copyright law. So the courts will have to decide if that's truly what they will interpret, or will they take the redistribution & usage restrictions of the GPL as a separable matter.
- gillianseed 11y ago
  Oh please, even the author of the CDDL license states that this is so (Danese Cooper). And it's not as if that admission was ever needed, were you even around back then ? Solaris was being killed in the market by Linux, Sun decided to go open source in an effort to better compete with Linux, but there was NO way that they would give away their prized technology (ZFS, DTrace) under a license which would allow their main competitor to whom they were losing, to integrate said technology. Hence CDDL, GPLv2 incompatible.
  - cyphar 11y ago
    > Oh please, even the author of the CDDL license states that this is so (Danese Cooper). Wikipedia mentions several other authors. Maybe Wikipedia is wrong, but I am doubtful only one person wrote the CDDL. > Solaris was being killed in the market by Linux, Sun decided to go open source in an effort to better compete with Linux, but there was NO way that they would give away their prized technology (ZFS, DTrace) under a license which would allow their main competitor to whom they were losing, to integrate said technology. That is one telling of the story. Other Sun employees have different tellings. It's not as cut and dry as you claim. CDDL is GPL incompatible in a very subtle way. The copyright of the CDDL licensed code isn't infringed, it's technically the copyright of the GPL code that's infringed. CDDL allows distribution of the binaries under a different license (provided the license doesn't restrict the users' rights, which the GPL doesn't), but the source files must always be under the same license. The GPL requires the source files for the "dervied work" be under the same license, which is where the incompatibility steps in.

protomyth 11y ago

> The SFConservancy is just practicing GPL overreach here, and is rattling a saber in hopes that Oracle blinks. Why would Oracle care? Oracle is not involved in OpenZFS and has closed source all of their changes for a while. The new code (which is a lot) is not owned by Oracle. It is owned by the individual contributors as OpenZFS is not doing copyright assignments.

cyphar 11y ago
> > The SFConservancy is just practicing GPL overreach here, and is rattling a saber in hopes that Oracle blinks. > Why would Oracle care? Oracle is not involved in OpenZFS and has closed source all of their changes for a while. The new code (which is a lot) is not owned by Oracle. It is owned by the individual contributors as OpenZFS is not doing copyright assignments. That's not how copyright works, and we've all seen how zealous Oracle loves to get with copyright arguments (the Android thing, for example).
- protomyth 11y ago
  That's exactly how copyright works. Without an assignment or contract, the author owns the copyright.
  - krylon 11y ago
    This probably doesn't affect the argument one way or the other, but in Germany, if some company employs you, and you write some code as part of your work for that company, AFAIK, copyright for that code automatically belongs to the company. There are even cases where copyright for code you write after leaving the company could be considered to belong to that company.
    - protomyth 11y ago
      The basic argument is that the OpenZFS folks have not been assigning their copyrights to Oracle after the Sun buyout and are not subject to what you have encountered in Germany (which I find just wrong, sorry for your troubles). Perhaps LGPL would be a better license for an OS (might be an interesting discussion).