> I'm not sure how anyone can argue with a straight face that OpenZFS is derived from GPL GPL requires any code linked against it which fundamentally requires

> I'm not sure how anyone can argue with a straight face that OpenZFS is derived from GPL GPL requires any code linked against it which fundamentally requires it to be useful (Nvidia/zfs linked into the linux kernel to be used in linux) to also be licensed as GPL or GPL compatible. To my knowledge that was the major stopper for zfs and a major stopper for me to use any GPL code in software I plan to distribute. IANAL but GPL is vague enough that it can be argued either way. The "dubious license" terminology was incorrect from me, I was referring to it not being GPL compliant or at least there is skeptocism about whether it is. The BSD license does not have these restrictions and is fine. Regarding the compat shim, if it has to link to any kernel APIs stability isn't guaranteed, if you want a reasonable guarantee of stability then as one of the above comments mentioned and I alluded to. Do the legwork to allow userspace drivers in the linux kernel, nobody said it's easy and it seems like the consensus is to just keep the shim up to date instead of trying to push that but if you want a stable API to code against that's your path. As was mentioned in this comment section Linus has publicly stated where possible userspace APIs are to be treated as sacred.