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Canonical Talks Up Ubuntu 16.04 LTS With ZFS, LXD

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  • #11
    Originally posted by bug77 View Post

    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.
    Then the lawyers provided false information to Canonical. If they spoke to RMS, who is the head of the FSF and #1 advocate of the GPL, then he would have told Canonical and/or their lawyers that the CDDL is a violation and should not be included by default.

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    • #12
      Originally posted by r_a_trip View Post

      I don't think that Canonical needs to be worried about the FSF and SFLC. The silence of Oracle is far more worrisome.
      This. Canonical is taking a bit of a risk - in the best case they get to ship ZFS, but in the worst case it will be a PR disaster if they lose against Oracle and have to withdraw ZFS after tens of thousands of customers have already started using it. Once it's out there being used in the wild there will be no viable automated upgrade route back to ext4 (or whatever), and customer systems will be unbootable if Canonical is forced to push kernel upgrades that don't support ZFS.

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      • #13
        Originally posted by k1l_ View Post
        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.
        Someone should ask Linus what he thinks about ZFS and Canonical. I'm sure he has an opinion.

        The AFS argument might be valid, but the concerns are that

        1) AFS was old (1980s) and predated Linux so the argument was more clear cut.

        2) AFS was probably far less invasive in terms of the kernel internals. ZFS has been described as a "rampant layering violation" and I'd guess that means the Linux implementation has to rely much more on kernel internals than a traditional file system implementation.

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        • #14
          Originally posted by chrisb View Post

          but in the worst case it will be a PR disaster if they lose against Oracle and have to withdraw ZFS after tens of thousands of customers have already started using it. Once it's out there being used in the wild there will be no viable automated upgrade route back to ext4 (or whatever), and customer systems will be unbootable if Canonical is forced to push kernel upgrades that don't support ZFS.
          To make use of ZFS, one must be quiet knowledge about computers and thus knows about the legal implications; it is all over the news. I doubt that many people will actually use it; I know I will not. We will wait to see what happens. I think that Canonical is testing the waters regarding ZFS. Maybe they hope to go to court to get this cleared. If they win, then they have added a great new feature to their OS and people will start using it. If they loose, well.. nothing really is lost. If anybody starts using Ubuntu's ZFS, they are grown up enough to understand the implications.

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          • #15
            Originally posted by tegs View Post

            Then the lawyers provided false information to Canonical. If they spoke to RMS, who is the head of the FSF and #1 advocate of the GPL, then he would have told Canonical and/or their lawyers that the CDDL is a violation and should not be included by default.
            RMS may advocate for GPL, but that doesn't make him a lawyer.
            Why would you think he knows better than lawyers anyway? And I'm not saying Canonical's lawyers are right, I'm just saying you can't tell at this point. You can have an opinion, but you can't tell.

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            • #16
              I was told that there's absolutely no issue with CDDL violation (i.e. Oracle has no legal case). OpenZFS was legally forked before Oracle closed off their Solaris/ZFS code. The only issue is whether distributing ZFS the way Ubuntu has violates the GPL.

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              • #17
                And so the further forking of Linux is upon us Canonical have been diverging from other distributions for a long time. Supporting ZFS when other distro's don't is just another step along that divergence, Unity, Mir and now ZFS.

                The silence of Oracle doesn't surprise me as Canonical's moves only help to weaken Linux's position and that could well benefit Oracle in the longer term.

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                • #18
                  Is the discussion about, and risk of being sued here because Canonical is large? Other Linux distributions have been including ZFS by default for over a year now and nobody has done anything to stop them. I guess why would we think Canonical would be a different story?

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                  • #19
                    Folks,

                    If this ever gets to court, nobody knows how the court will rule, not even the lawyers. This is not a clear cut situation either way.

                    The GPL license is constructed around "derived work". That actually leaves a lot of room of interpretation to the court, if it ever gets there. And, to the best of my knowledge, there isn't much precedent with respect to the GPL either. FWIW, CDDL is file based, and more straightforward to interpret.

                    Saying with certainty that Canonical has violated the GPL v2 license is only indicative of the Dunning Kruger effect.

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                    • #20
                      Originally posted by tegs View Post

                      Then the lawyers provided false information to Canonical. If they spoke to RMS, who is the head of the FSF and #1 advocate of the GPL, then he would have told Canonical and/or their lawyers that the CDDL is a violation and should not be included by default.
                      RMS tells everyone who asked or not, to just use GPL because its the best licence in the world. Have you ever seen a Car-maker saying "Dont buy our car, but the one from the other Car-makers"? You see the point, this is a license piss-contest. The FSF didnt care about other GPL violations on the ARM market where there is not such PR, for example.
                      But RMS also says one should steal food and other stuff instead of coding closed souce software for an income. So i would not rely on what RMS said when it comes to legal issues at all.


                      Originally posted by chrisb View Post

                      Someone should ask Linus what he thinks about ZFS and Canonical. I'm sure he has an opinion.

                      The AFS argument might be valid, but the concerns are that

                      1) AFS was old (1980s) and predated Linux so the argument was more clear cut.

                      2) AFS was probably far less invasive in terms of the kernel internals. ZFS has been described as a "rampant layering violation" and I'd guess that means the Linux implementation has to rely much more on kernel internals than a traditional file system implementation.
                      IMHO the reason why there is such a silence from the real copyright holders from the kernel is because they like that ZFS finally made it to Linux.
                      Linus said back then that he doesnt think this AFS-setup/issue would come up again since he didnt think there would be a FS "not written with Linux in mind". But ZFS was made for Solaris only and then ported to Freebsd, apple and then Linux.

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