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> The CDDL is more permissive, it's a weak copyleft license while the GPL is strong copyleft, and that makes the two incompatible. Calling it "excessive freenes
by starspangled 2y ago
> The CDDL is more permissive, it's a weak copyleft license while the GPL is strong copyleft, and that makes the two incompatible. Calling it "excessive freeness" is inflammatory, but they're broadly correct.
It's not really. Many aspects of the license are free-er, but that's not what causes the incompatibility. The GPL does not have any kind of clause saying code that is distributed under too permissive of a license may not be incorporated into a derived/combined work. It's not that it's weak copyleft, it is that it contains particular restrictions that makes it incompatible with GPL's restrictions.
BSD licenses do not have that incompatible restriction (= are freer than CDDL, in that aspect) and can be compatible with the GPL.
- arp242 2y agoThe basic problem is that both licenses have a "you must redistribute under this license, and you can't impose additional restrictions"-type clause. There are some other differences between the licences, but that's what the incompatibility is about. Some have argued that this may not actually constitute an incompatibility, but not many are keen to "fuck around and find out" with Oracle's lawyers. So here we are.
- ChocolateGod 2y ago> but not many are keen to "fuck around and find out" with Oracle's lawyers Oracle could spend 10 minutes and clear this up, but the fact they don't should be fear enough about any large company shipping with OpenZFS code. See Oracle vs Google
- arp242 2y agoI'm not sure if it's that easy, because all the contributors to OpenZFS also need to sign off an a license change, right? That said, they did relicense DTrace to GPL a few years back. but I don't really know the details on that, or how hard it was, or if that's also possible for OpenZFS.