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I am not a lawyer, but I have yet to speak to a lawyer who claimed you could not distribute a Linux kernel module under an "incompatible" license when the said

by ryao 12y ago

I am not a lawyer, but I have yet to speak to a lawyer who claimed you could not distribute a Linux kernel module under an "incompatible" license when the said module is not considered a derived work of GPL software. Any Linux port of ZFS is a derived work of OpenSolaris (in the legal sense), such that you can distribute ZFS with Linux as long as it is a separate kernel module. There are plenty of companies doing this. I have spoken to lawyers regarding this and I have yet to meet a lawyer who disagrees when asked if the GPL applies to a Linux ZFS kernel module. To be honest, I did encounter one attorney who thought that certain forms of advertising might be able to trigger the derived works clause, but he considered it to be an avoidable problem and his opinion was an outlier.

Maakuth 12y ago
To my understanding this is quite an open issue, and it's hard to find a company that would want to risk it in court. ZFS on Linux project currently distributes the modules as source, and they are built for particular kernel locally in any machine that needs the modules. This is the same approach as GPU vendors do with their closed source graphics drivers.