This is not a new argument or discussion. The Conservancy, and GNU (especially Eben Moglen, who tends to get deferred to on interpretations of the GPL, for a va

This is not a new argument or discussion. The Conservancy, and GNU (especially Eben Moglen, who tends to get deferred to on interpretations of the GPL, for a variety of good reasons) believe the distribution of the drivers inside a binary memory image like initrd constitute a violation of the license(s). The only way to determine definitely if they are correct (I happen to think they are, but that's irrelevant) is if a copyright holder with standing decides to issue a desist and the thing carries on into court. My (also irrelevant) opinion is that if that were to occur Canonical would probably revert to Debian's solution of shipping ZFS as source-only rather than litigate it. As it currently stands, none of this seems likely to happen, so further conversation about it isn't really relevant or particularly useful.