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You take quite a logical leap from "licenses are incompatible" to "illegal to distribute them together." I'd love to know what led you to that conclusion. As I

You take quite a logical leap from "licenses are incompatible" to "illegal to distribute them together." I'd love to know what led you to that conclusion. As I said to the other poster, you're just spreading FUD.

bkor 13y ago
If the licenses are incompatible, then you cannot ship them together. Calling that FUD is a bit rich! Try going through the process at Fedora. The legal team will stop you. Licenses allow you to distribute things despite copyright. Usually distributing software without a license is illegal, though there are exceptions in some countries for music and movies. You can obviously nitpick about that he uses "illegal". However, the discussion was about why ZFS is not distributed. That is what the answer was about, incompatible licenses making it (somewhat) impossible for distributions to carry it. Now various distributions do have e.g. "nonfree" repositories, but incompatible licenses are a big problem. Responding to such concerns with "just spreading FUD" seems to (hopefully) indicate you're not involved with any distribution.
- insaneirish 13y ago
  It is FUD. Gentoo is choosing to ship the modules: http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?79312-ZFS-On-Linux-Is-Now-Set-For-quot-Wide-Scale-Deployment-quot&p=322923#post322923 http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?79312-ZFS-On-Linux...
  - bkor 13y ago
    I mean a legal opinion on this matter. Pointing to a random distribution is not enough. They might be doing something that they shouldn't have. Try to be concrete, just "FUD FUD FUD" is not impressive as an answer.
merijnv 13y ago
Dude, that's literally what "licenses are incompatible" means. The GPL gives you a license to distribute IF AND ONLY IF all the linked binaries have AT LEAST the same permissive rights as the GPL mandates. The CDDL gives rights SIMILAR to GPL, but in a way that is incompatible, i.e. which does not let you distribute CDDL code with all the permissions the GPL mandates. As such, you void the license to distribute the GPL code, as you're unable to comply with the GPL license (i.e. the bit that all linked binaries have at least the GPL enforced liberties). The GPL's license to distribute is dependent on you distributing binaries with the appropriate permissions and the CDDL won't let you.
- insaneirish 13y ago
  If it was a legal issue, everyone would be scared of shipping not open graphics drivers as well. Richard Yao from Gentoo summarizes it quite well (http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?79312-ZFS-On-Linux-Is-Now-Set-For-quot-Wide-Scale-Deployment-quot&p=322923#post322923 http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?79312-ZFS-On-Linux...). I don't think lack of manpower has been the only thing preventing it. I think idealogical issues are the main factor.
  - lucian1900 13y ago
    There is no issue with non-free drivers, since they are explicitly licensed by the copyright owner to be redistributable by anyone and they explicitly installed/enabled by users, so Linux's license is also satisfied. ZFS could be shipped in a similar manner to drivers, by requiring explicit user action to enable (I believe this is what Gentoo are doing). However, it makes a lot less sense for a filesystem, since the switching costs are much higher than for a graphics driver.
    - insaneirish 13y ago
      It makes exactly the same sense! The installer could require explicit user action to pick ZFS. And there you go, the root filesystem would be on ZFS.
      - lucian1900 13y ago
        While Linux copyright owners generally allow the (small) breach of GPL that is shipping GPL-incompatible modules (whereas it would be entirely fine if they were installed separately) and the driver copyright owners also explicitly allow redistribution, ZFS's copyright owners have made no such allowance. It would at least breach ZFS's license to ship it.
  - belorn 13y ago
    A license is only as enforced as the author want it to be. In the case of Linux, the author has expressed an explicit opinion that most linux+driver combination do not create a derivative work.

bkor 13y ago

If the licenses are incompatible, then you cannot ship them together. Calling that FUD is a bit rich! Try going through the process at Fedora. The legal team will stop you. Licenses allow you to distribute things despite copyright. Usually distributing software without a license is illegal, though there are exceptions in some countries for music and movies. You can obviously nitpick about that he uses "illegal". However, the discussion was about why ZFS is not distributed. That is what the answer was about, incompatible licenses making it (somewhat) impossible for distributions to carry it. Now various distributions do have e.g. "nonfree" repositories, but incompatible licenses are a big problem. Responding to such concerns with "just spreading FUD" seems to (hopefully) indicate you're not involved with any distribution.

insaneirish 13y ago
It is FUD. Gentoo is choosing to ship the modules: http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?79312-ZFS-On-Linux-Is-Now-Set-For-quot-Wide-Scale-Deployment-quot&p=322923#post322923 http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?79312-ZFS-On-Linux...
- bkor 13y ago
  I mean a legal opinion on this matter. Pointing to a random distribution is not enough. They might be doing something that they shouldn't have. Try to be concrete, just "FUD FUD FUD" is not impressive as an answer.

merijnv 13y ago

Dude, that's literally what "licenses are incompatible" means. The GPL gives you a license to distribute IF AND ONLY IF all the linked binaries have AT LEAST the same permissive rights as the GPL mandates. The CDDL gives rights SIMILAR to GPL, but in a way that is incompatible, i.e. which does not let you distribute CDDL code with all the permissions the GPL mandates. As such, you void the license to distribute the GPL code, as you're unable to comply with the GPL license (i.e. the bit that all linked binaries have at least the GPL enforced liberties). The GPL's license to distribute is dependent on you distributing binaries with the appropriate permissions and the CDDL won't let you.

insaneirish 13y ago
If it was a legal issue, everyone would be scared of shipping not open graphics drivers as well. Richard Yao from Gentoo summarizes it quite well (http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?79312-ZFS-On-Linux-Is-Now-Set-For-quot-Wide-Scale-Deployment-quot&p=322923#post322923 http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?79312-ZFS-On-Linux...). I don't think lack of manpower has been the only thing preventing it. I think idealogical issues are the main factor.
- lucian1900 13y ago
  There is no issue with non-free drivers, since they are explicitly licensed by the copyright owner to be redistributable by anyone and they explicitly installed/enabled by users, so Linux's license is also satisfied. ZFS could be shipped in a similar manner to drivers, by requiring explicit user action to enable (I believe this is what Gentoo are doing). However, it makes a lot less sense for a filesystem, since the switching costs are much higher than for a graphics driver.
  - insaneirish 13y ago
    It makes exactly the same sense! The installer could require explicit user action to pick ZFS. And there you go, the root filesystem would be on ZFS.
    - lucian1900 13y ago
      While Linux copyright owners generally allow the (small) breach of GPL that is shipping GPL-incompatible modules (whereas it would be entirely fine if they were installed separately) and the driver copyright owners also explicitly allow redistribution, ZFS's copyright owners have made no such allowance. It would at least breach ZFS's license to ship it.
- belorn 13y ago
  A license is only as enforced as the author want it to be. In the case of Linux, the author has expressed an explicit opinion that most linux+driver combination do not create a derivative work.