Canonical Talks Up Ubuntu 16.04 LTS With ZFS, LXD

[finalzone]

GPL insists that every "derived work" that comes together with GPL, must be under GPL as well. Canonical does not claim ZFS is under GPL, so it doesn't violate CDDL requirement and Oracle has no grounds to sue. Canonical also claims that ZFS is not a derived work of the kernel, therefore they can keep CDDL license, but some people disagree.

Meaning the CDDL license was deliberately made incompatible GPL (that came before CDDL exists) by SUN engineers for redistribution. Oracle being the owner of that license did say nothing to clarify the matter. That is why commercial distributions avoid including OpenZFS inside the media or chose shipping it as source.

[Luke]

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.

That has a counter. The license issue concerns DISTRIBUTION, so a user could simply roll back to a previous kernel version. Thus, if you want to use ZFS with Ubuntu you need to save the older kernel packages or be prepared to build the kernel yourself with ZFS support compiled back in. BTW, if Ubuntu loses a 3ed party or possibly Ubuntu themselves depending on the court ruling could certainly offer the module source code and simply forget about distributing binaries. A DKMS module would be another option.

[johnc]

Oracle doesn't even own ZFS. They own the parts that they've written recently. Everything that was open-sourced is owned by the original authors, most of which don't even work for Oracle.

There are all kinds of systems shipping with ZFS. Canonical isn't doing anything new here. The GPL incompatibility is the only question mark, not Oracle's position.

[unixfan2001]

Because he wrote all versions of the GPL. Idiot.

Cool story, bro!

I'm going to write a license that is going to turn whoever accepts it into an indentured servant.
According to your logic, people will have to follow it and pick cotton in my backyard. Because, apparently, a license text trumps binding law now...

[unixfan2001]

Meaning the CDDL license was deliberately made incompatible GPL (that came before CDDL exists) by SUN engineers for redistribution.

Can we please cut the FUD short?
The fact that the CDDL is incompatible with the GPL has got nothing to do with being deliberate or promoting Solaris over GNU/Linux.

Furthermore, the CDDL has good reasons for its existence.

Back then, the GPL was missing an explicit patent grant.
The GPL is project based, whereas the CDDL is file based (which, by the by, is one of the main reasons the GPL folks consider it incompatible to their license). The latter making it much easier to argue possible copyright violations.
The CDDL was tailored towards adhering to the DMCA and European copyright law. The GPL was not.

[starshipeleven]

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.

ZFS for boot drives? wut?


Also, Oracle would be a bunch of idiots if the decided to sue Canonical anytime soon, as even if they won there is no money to be milked from Canonical.

AND, the ZFS on linux isn't using exactly Oracle code, but code that was opensourced by others and Oracle is using as a base for their ZFS which is closed source or something.

[unixfan2001]

ZFS for boot drives? wut?


Also, Oracle would be a bunch of idiots if the decided to sue Canonical anytime soon, as even if they won there is no money to be milked from Canonical.

AND, the ZFS on linux isn't using exactly Oracle code, but code that was opensourced by others and Oracle is using as a base for their ZFS which is closed source or something.

Doesn't exactly keep people from suing. Thanks to the whole derivative spiel.

It also wasn't open sourced by others. ZFS was open sourced by the original development team at Sun Microsystems (now part of Oracle).
The meat of ZoL is still that same code developed at Sun.

[starshipeleven]

It also wasn't open sourced by others. ZFS was open sourced by the original development team at Sun Microsystems (now part of Oracle).
The meat of ZoL is still that same code developed at Sun.

Yeah, I was thinking about the fact that the only way to have any standing to sue would be to change the license of the code already out in the wild.

The point here is that GPL is incompatible with CDDL, not the contrary.
Sure, some say it was made to be incompatible and waah waah wahh Oracle Evil, but if the violation is on the GPL side and not on the CDDL side, Oracle cannot really do anything about it without changing license.

So unless Oracle changes licensing of the code already in the wild, which I doubt is feasible at all (theoretically doable as they have the IP, but feasible... hmm), they don't really have any standing for suing anyone using ZFS on linux.

Here the only one that can really sue is some copyright holder of GPL code in linux kernel.

[Mystro256]

Can we please cut the FUD short?
The fact that the CDDL is incompatible with the GPL has got nothing to do with being deliberate or promoting Solaris over GNU/Linux.

I believe this is actually somewhat true. I think it was a part of this talk, though I could be wrong (I can't find a transcript unfortunately):

http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/debconf6/theora-small/2006-05-14/tower/OpenSolaris_Java_and_Debian-Simon_Phipps__Alvaro_Lopez_Ortega.ogg

[r_a_trip]

So unless Oracle changes licensing of the code already in the wild, which I doubt is feasible at all (theoretically doable as they have the IP, but feasible... hmm), they don't really have any standing for suing anyone using ZFS on linux.

Here the only one that can really sue is some copyright holder of GPL code in linux kernel.

Like I already said in this thread, Oracle is a Linux kernel contributor. So how does Oracle not have standing to sue? If CDDL is deemed incompatible with the GPL and Oracle doesn't want it in Linux, they can use the GPL to put the kibosh on it.