Canonical ships ZFS like Nvidia ships proprietary drivers, which seems to work (legally and technically) but it means the development of ZoL is a bit cumbersome and can never be integrated in the kernel development like other filesystems.
Oh dear, I didn’t know that. Thanks for the info. I genuinely wish that people would stop using these pushover licenses. I thought it was like the LGPL, but sadly it isn’t. At least the base remains free though.
It’s kinda comparable in terms, but because both licenses have comparable copyleft “no rights may be removed and no terms added” restrictions they conflict and can’t be merged.
CDDL came after GPL, and I’m not convinced by the arguments for why it was used (to make some kind of development with commercial modules easier, but this could’ve been done with GPL + exceptions)
That license plus patents (which only are freely licensed to the CDDL implementation specifically) means you can’t just rewrite it for Linux either. You’d have to wait for the patents to expire and then do clean room reverse engineering.
But we have OpenZFS, which is under CDDL (=LGPL). So it’s fine.
Edit: I was wrong, see comment below.
CDDL is not LGPL and is GPL incompatible
How so?
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#CDDL
Canonical ships ZFS like Nvidia ships proprietary drivers, which seems to work (legally and technically) but it means the development of ZoL is a bit cumbersome and can never be integrated in the kernel development like other filesystems.
Oh dear, I didn’t know that. Thanks for the info. I genuinely wish that people would stop using these pushover licenses. I thought it was like the LGPL, but sadly it isn’t. At least the base remains free though.
It’s kinda comparable in terms, but because both licenses have comparable copyleft “no rights may be removed and no terms added” restrictions they conflict and can’t be merged.
CDDL came after GPL, and I’m not convinced by the arguments for why it was used (to make some kind of development with commercial modules easier, but this could’ve been done with GPL + exceptions)
That license plus patents (which only are freely licensed to the CDDL implementation specifically) means you can’t just rewrite it for Linux either. You’d have to wait for the patents to expire and then do clean room reverse engineering.