Canonical Talks Up Ubuntu 16.04 LTS With ZFS, LXD

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Canonical Talks Up Ubuntu 16.04 LTS With ZFS, LXD

A day ahead of the launch of Ubuntu 16.04 as the sixth Long Term Support release, Canonical is talking about the new features for this release codenamed the Xenial Xerus...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-16.04-Features

[tegs]

I see the threats from the FSF and Software Freedom Law Center didn't take any effect on Canonical. If they do not sue Canonical (and win) for the GPL violation, then that opens up the door for future GPL violations and dilutes the purpose of the GPL.

[hagda]

I see the threats from the FSF and Software Freedom Law Center didn't take any effect on Canonical. If they do not sue Canonical (and win) for the GPL violation, then that opens up the door for future GPL violations and dilutes the purpose of the GPL.

I'd donate to the FSF to have Canonical sued over this. But I'm not sure if the FSF would dare such a PR-stunt.

[k1l_]

I see the threats from the FSF and Software Freedom Law Center didn't take any effect on Canonical. If they do not sue Canonical (and win) for the GPL violation, then that opens up the door for future GPL violations and dilutes the purpose of the GPL.

The FSF cant sue themselves. They could only help/pay the copyright holders from the Linux Kernel to file a lawsuite.
But first its not like this is all the way the FSF tries to make it look like. This is not a clear and easy win if this goes to a court. Secondly it seems like no one is caring because everyone wants ZFS on Linux as long as btrfs is not stable enough.

So it looks like the threats from the FSF extremists in this licence piss contest didnt work out.

[r_a_trip]

I see the threats from the FSF and Software Freedom Law Center didn't take any effect on Canonical.

I don't think that Canonical needs to be worried about the FSF and SFLC. The silence of Oracle is far more worrisome.

By virtue of Sun being the initial developer and publisher of ZFS under the CDDL, Oracle is now the party which owns the majority of the code in ZFS. Since the CDDL is not GPL compatible and Oracle is simultaneaously a contibutor to the Linux kernel, they are certainly the party with standing to sue Canonical.

After all, Oracle kept ZFS GPL incompatible. They could have ported their code as owner of it to Linux under a GPL compatible license any time and released it as part of Unbreakable Linux. They didn't.

With the inclusion of ZFS (under a dubious legal theory) Canonical cuts into Oracle's Solaris market. I wouldn't be surprised if a cease and desist appeared around the time Ubuntu 16.04 goes gold.

[tegs]

The FSF cant sue themselves. .

How would they be suing themselves? The GPL is their license and the CDDL license is GPL incompatible. If you try to combine code that is not GPL compatible with GPL licensed code, you have a problem. The big issue is that Canonical is distributing a custom version of their kernel that violates the GPL.

That's why distros like Trisquel (based off of Ubuntu) are purging anything ZFS related (not installed by default, cannot install the package manually) as to be a 100% libre distribution that respects the licenses of others.

[SyXbiT]

What ever happened to Unity 8 and Mir?

[bug77]

I see the threats from the FSF and Software Freedom Law Center didn't take any effect on Canonical. If they do not sue Canonical (and win) for the GPL violation, then that opens up the door for future GPL violations and dilutes the purpose of the GPL.

It seems you are sure Canonical has committed copyright violation here. Unless you're a lawyer, I'd say at this point you really can't be sure. After all Canonical has stated they only included ZFS after consulting their own lawyers.

Fwiw, I'm on 16.04 already, but couldn't tell you exactly what changed. I've been using PPAs for X and KDE, so the user facing stuff I already had.

[k1l_]

How would they be suing themselves? The GPL is their license and the CDDL license is GPL incompatible. If you try to combine code that is not GPL compatible with GPL licensed code, you have a problem. The big issue is that Canonical is distributing a custom version of their kernel that violates the GPL.

That's why distros like Trisquel (based off of Ubuntu) are purging anything ZFS related (not installed by default, cannot install the package manually) as to be a 100% libre distribution that respects the licenses of others.

OK that was poorly phrased by me. What I meant: The FSF can't file a lawsuit on their own since only affected Copyright holders can do.

The thing is that the CDDL is just not compatible with the GPL because of parts of the GPL license.
And you can combine a lot of stuff with the GPL, even other closed Source stuff works.
So that all boils down to: is the zfs Module a derived works or not? And there was Linus himself making a very interesting Statement for the AFS Module back then, which was a very similar set up.

[tegs]

What ever happened to Unity 8 and Mir?

We'll have to wait 6 more months for Ubuntu 16.10