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> While I think Oracle and the Illumos and OpenZFS contributors should come together to relicense the ZFS codebase under MPLv2 to solve the GPL compatibility pr

> While I think Oracle and the Illumos and OpenZFS contributors should come together to relicense the ZFS codebase under MPLv2 to solve the GPL compatibility problem For starters Oracle would need to relicense their work. Which is unlikely to happen any time soon. If they wanted to relicense it they would have done it by now. All OpenZFS contributers would also need to relicense their code. If I recall correctly the OpenZFS codebase consists for close to 50% out of non-Oracle code. A lot of this code might be contributed by companies where the people who did the work no longer work there. Meaning there is no-one in those companies to get legal to sign-off on it. Short version: Don't hold your breath.

pabs3 5y ago
All Oracle needs to do is release CDDL 2.0 that says "At your option, you may choose to relicense CDDL 1.0 licensed code under any of the MPLv2, LGPLv2+, GPLv2+, AGPLv3+ licenses" and then anyone can relicense any CDDL 1.0 code from any copyright holder under those licenses, since CDDL 1.0 contains a license upgrade clause. That would solve the situation for OpenZFS contributor's code too and also Oracles code and also dtrace/Solaris/etc code in general.
- jsiepkes 5y ago
  That would have consequences reaching far beyond ZFS. A blastzone which no one will be able to oversee. I would therefor say it is extremely unlikely any company (let alone Oracle) would ever sign-off on such a thing.
  - pabs3 5y ago
    PS: I didn't think CDDL was used much outside of Solaris (now proprietary again and the forks of it aren't active I thought) and OpenZFS. Are there other significant CDDL licensed codebases?
    - jsiepkes 5y ago
      > Solaris (now proprietary again and the forks of it aren't active I thought) The Solaris forks (based on Illumos[1]) such as SmartOS[2] are pretty active! > Are there other significant CDDL licensed codebases? A lot of the Java stuff was also CDDL licensed. Though some of that (larger projects such as OpenJDK) were already dual licensed with "GPLv2 + classpath exception". I also doubt it was used much outside of Sun. But even it's just the Sun stuff I still think no corporation would ever dare to make such a license update. [1] https://www.illumos.org/ https://www.illumos.org/ [2] https://wiki.smartos.org/ https://wiki.smartos.org/
  - pabs3 5y ago
    Its a pretty simple way to achieve compatibility between CDDL and other license spheres, which can only be a good thing really, personally I consider that incompatibility to have been a mistake that didn't really help anyway. Achieving compatibility is unlikely something Oracle cares about though, so the license situation isn't going to change anyway. BTW, they have relicensed things under the GPL before (IIRC ZFS for grub and ISTR something around dtrace), so they aren't adverse to it.

pabs3 5y ago

All Oracle needs to do is release CDDL 2.0 that says "At your option, you may choose to relicense CDDL 1.0 licensed code under any of the MPLv2, LGPLv2+, GPLv2+, AGPLv3+ licenses" and then anyone can relicense any CDDL 1.0 code from any copyright holder under those licenses, since CDDL 1.0 contains a license upgrade clause. That would solve the situation for OpenZFS contributor's code too and also Oracles code and also dtrace/Solaris/etc code in general.

jsiepkes 5y ago
That would have consequences reaching far beyond ZFS. A blastzone which no one will be able to oversee. I would therefor say it is extremely unlikely any company (let alone Oracle) would ever sign-off on such a thing.
- pabs3 5y ago
  PS: I didn't think CDDL was used much outside of Solaris (now proprietary again and the forks of it aren't active I thought) and OpenZFS. Are there other significant CDDL licensed codebases?
  - jsiepkes 5y ago
    > Solaris (now proprietary again and the forks of it aren't active I thought) The Solaris forks (based on Illumos[1]) such as SmartOS[2] are pretty active! > Are there other significant CDDL licensed codebases? A lot of the Java stuff was also CDDL licensed. Though some of that (larger projects such as OpenJDK) were already dual licensed with "GPLv2 + classpath exception". I also doubt it was used much outside of Sun. But even it's just the Sun stuff I still think no corporation would ever dare to make such a license update. [1] https://www.illumos.org/ https://www.illumos.org/ [2] https://wiki.smartos.org/ https://wiki.smartos.org/
- pabs3 5y ago
  Its a pretty simple way to achieve compatibility between CDDL and other license spheres, which can only be a good thing really, personally I consider that incompatibility to have been a mistake that didn't really help anyway. Achieving compatibility is unlikely something Oracle cares about though, so the license situation isn't going to change anyway. BTW, they have relicensed things under the GPL before (IIRC ZFS for grub and ISTR something around dtrace), so they aren't adverse to it.