Ubuntu's New Desktop Installer Working On Auto-Install, Active Directory Integration

[jorgepl]

No, they weren't "on their own." There's a lot of people behind the OpenZFS project and Canonical is just packaging, testing, and distributing what they're doing. You know, like most distributions do.

Linus doesn't trust Oracle. Big woop. Linus is not a lawyer. He's not qualified to express an educated opinion on the legal enforceability of the licensing terms. Oracle v. Google? Java's pre-GPL license terms are very different than the license grant in OpenZFS. Each copyright case outcome is specific to the license terms the work is being released under. Nothing really stops Oracle from suing anyone regardless of the merits of the case. That's the major flaw in the US legal system. But then again, nothing really stops IBM from enforcing their massive patent portfolio except their continued good will towards the global developer community, and that's a far more dangerous existential threat than Oracle... yet few people point that out. IBM's got really good PR.

They were on their own in the sense that OpenZFS only formally supported themselves Fedora, CentOS, OpenSuse and RHEL, and the work on supporting Ubuntu was left to the Ubuntu developers.

[jorgepl]

Linus did in fact ask Oracle's legal department, owner of ZFS, the okay of letting ZFS kernel module in kernel tree and treat it under GPL license without a single reply.

https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=189711&curpostid=189841

Let remind that Oracle had no problem relicensing other SUN's libraries like D-Trace under GPL except in this case ZFS.

I think Oracle is not the sole owner of ZFS, and that's why it's a mess nobody can fix.

But seriously, I think it's pretty clear this only affects ZFS being mainlined. OpenZFS external modules works pretty well.

[oiaohm]

That was a bunch of talking, but the truth is Linus Torvalds doesn't care about external propietary modules, even for small companies (look at iot, embedded). The world is built around these propietary modules. What he cares about is reusing Linux code into a propietary project.

However, it is true Linux makes it difficult (sometimes intentionally difficult) to maintain these propietary modules, same it's just easier (and much better for the overall quality of both the kernel and the module) to mainline it.

Linux Torvalds is not in the enforcement side. Greg Kroah-Hartman does work with the legal departments linked to the Linux Foundation. Both Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman make statements that they don't seam to care but its more tricky than that. The reality here is the Linux foundation normally does not take companies to court in copyright case this is too costly is there a cheaper route. https://www.cbp.gov/trade/priority-issues/ipr Yes customs. Customs is a nice fun with with intellectual property because it guilty proven innocent not innocent until proven guilty. Also its a lot shorter and cheaper process.

Different parties importing embedded Linux devices these are normally smaller companies and they normal come into line with GPL license when large volume of their product get taken by customs and is on the path to being crashed. GPL enforcement exists and quite effective. The customs route also avoids media involvement. GPL enforcement slaps over wrist is customs. Making a product with ZFS inside with Linux kernel and shipping it between countries could be problematic.

Remember customs is guilty until proven innocent complex case with customs runs out of time and the items attempted to be imported get crashed. Customs unless there is already legal precedence saying what you are doing is fair use you are basically dead in the water because you are not getting to the fair usage debate over a item blocked at customs.

There is more than 1 way todo copyright enforcement. Customs enforcement is not lawyer vs lawyer. Its party attempting to import having to provide required paperwork to be legal to customs. Yes the GPL license declare bit of paper with a lot of things came about when not having this equaled products being crushed when they contained GPL works.

Customs is one of the parties that don't need to be the copyright holder to enforcement of license. Customs you can claim unfair competition because you are using the GPL project and releasing the source code as you should and the other party who is importing who will be competing with you is not. Customs is a very different form of copyright enforcement and its the type the Linux foundation likes. Particularly that developers don't end up being called into court and the like..

[oiaohm]

Linus did in fact ask Oracle's legal department, owner of ZFS, the okay of letting ZFS kernel module in kernel tree and treat it under GPL license without a single reply.
https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/...rpostid=189841
Let remind that Oracle had no problem relicensing other SUN's libraries like D-Trace under GPL except in this case ZFS.

https://www.eweek.com/storage/netapp-oracle-settle-old-patent-litigation-over-zfs/

https://indico.cern.ch/event/656544/contributions/2675014/attachments/1524135/2382374/ZFSetc.pdf

Page 4 of the PDF is important. Oracle closed the ZFS tree in 2010 and end their development in 2017. Yes the 2010 close of ZFS source code by Oracle aligns with Oracle settlement with netapp.

We know that the agreement between Oracle and Netapp is under NDA. Oracle may not have the right to re-license ZFS or work on ZFS in open source as part of the settle agreement with Netapp and may not even have the right to answer Linus question over it as this could be a breach of the NDA on the settlement agreement.

Yes OpenZFS developers did that PDF.

[_r00t-]

Add BTRFS support.

[jorgepl]

Linux Torvalds is not in the enforcement side. Greg Kroah-Hartman does work with the legal departments linked to the Linux Foundation. Both Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman make statements that they don't seam to care but its more tricky than that. The reality here is the Linux foundation normally does not take companies to court in copyright case this is too costly is there a cheaper route. https://www.cbp.gov/trade/priority-issues/ipr Yes customs. Customs is a nice fun with with intellectual property because it guilty proven innocent not innocent until proven guilty. Also its a lot shorter and cheaper process.

Different parties importing embedded Linux devices these are normally smaller companies and they normal come into line with GPL license when large volume of their product get taken by customs and is on the path to being crashed. GPL enforcement exists and quite effective. The customs route also avoids media involvement. GPL enforcement slaps over wrist is customs. Making a product with ZFS inside with Linux kernel and shipping it between countries could be problematic.

Remember customs is guilty until proven innocent complex case with customs runs out of time and the items attempted to be imported get crashed. Customs unless there is already legal precedence saying what you are doing is fair use you are basically dead in the water because you are not getting to the fair usage debate over a item blocked at customs.

There is more than 1 way todo copyright enforcement. Customs enforcement is not lawyer vs lawyer. Its party attempting to import having to provide required paperwork to be legal to customs. Yes the GPL license declare bit of paper with a lot of things came about when not having this equaled products being crushed when they contained GPL works.

Customs is one of the parties that don't need to be the copyright holder to enforcement of license. Customs you can claim unfair competition because you are using the GPL project and releasing the source code as you should and the other party who is importing who will be competing with you is not. Customs is a very different form of copyright enforcement and its the type the Linux foundation likes. Particularly that developers don't end up being called into court and the like..

Xiaomi does sell lots of devices without complying with the GPL at all (not talking here about proprietary modules, but not releasing anything at all) and they don't have problems with customs. Even in the US, where they sell little, but their phones are in Walmart to be purchased looking at their website.

I know Greg has put restrictions in code, but I don't think he works in the legal side. I'm quite comfortable with the status quo right now, and I think the Linux Foundation is being very pragmatic about how to deal with the license. I hope they don't change it.

[ll1025]

It's kind of a shame that the open source world has never managed to come up with it's own answer to AD, which made everyone happy. I'll concede that it's a very, very hard problem to solve. Especially when it comes to meeting requirements like GDPR.

There are solutions (FreeIPA and its upstream RHEL IdM) but they don't provide Windows support. Yes-- you can sort of put something together by manually creating GPOs in the correct spot on a manually configured Samba share, but that's not really a solution an enterprise wants to mess with.

And because Windows / Office is so big, and thus AD is big, every vendor has an AD integration, with far less support for arbitrary kerberos / ldap directories.

It would be really nice if there was a good answer but that would require the last 25 years unfold differently.

[ll1025]

AD is the center of mass because Microsoft made it so fucking easy to create, join and manage an entire forest with just a few mouse clicks.

Telling people to use Samba and OpenLDAP to achieve AD functionality in Linux is the peak of ignorance and contempt for a user's time.

Only having read about those two, they wouldn't do AD functionality because you would need something to provide kerberos.

AD is a mix of a bunch of tech from DNS to certificate issuance to directory backend. FreeIPA is the closest you'd get and one of the few reasonable alternatives I've heard floated. But you still won't get easy management, GPOs require a bunch of workarounds to implement, and I don't think you can get auto cert issuance for hosts.

It's a huge hassle for dubious benefit.

[ll1025]

I've worked with Windows Domains, AD, and Samba since the NT 4 days, and... you're right, but these day it is *super easy* to set up a Samba-based AD. My experience is that AD happened organically in a lot of orgs; they bought PCs and used peer-to-peer or print/storage appliances and shared accounts until they hit a breaking point and realized they needed to tie it all in and manage it. The desktop-end of things was what drove the back-office decisions, and Windows PCs were the only 'viable' business desktops you could get a full stack of supported business software for until quite recently.

Also, sure, you could build a directory system for other systems and probably develop plugins to use them in Windows (like... Netware did), but Microsoft still has a ton of control and I think they'd have made it hard to implement Group Policy-like features.

Setting it up and integrating things into it are two different things. Small shops, great option. Once you start getting over 20 people I'd pony up for the MS license because there's just too many ways for that to go sideways when something buys a product that advertises AD integration or gets a new printer that implements MIT kerberos incorrectly.

You don't have to like it but AD is the thing everyone tests against.

[oiaohm]

Xiaomi does sell lots of devices without complying with the GPL at all (not talking here about proprietary modules, but not releasing anything at all) and they don't have problems with customs. Even in the US, where they sell little, but their phones are in Walmart to be purchased looking at their website.

The customs process is messy. Xiaomi has been doing releases of kernels just not all the time. Stack of phone taken by customs for not GPL confirming phones crushed then Xiaomi employees someone to do a kernel release keeps them around for 2 to 3 years then fires them then a few years go by before customs grabs another batch start the process all over again. This is being a repeating cycle for a while.

If you go back to 2021 Xiaomi was releasing kernels. We are in gap of Xiaomi not having staff employed todo it and customs taking the time to inspect their shipments and declaring something wrong. The customs random sampling process for you.

Most people miss that parties like Xiaomi comply with GPL for a while then don't if you don't notice this you don't think to look into why. Also people don't notice Xiaomi getting import blacklisted due to attempting to import illegal products before they start doing GPL conformance again and then the ban goes away. Company like Xiaomi can afford to write off a few containers worth of phones and devices when customs catches them. Smaller companies don't do so well.

There is enforcement here just not media getting enforcement or constant. Think of customs with copyright like police officer out on the road with a speed camera they are not going to catch all people speeding and customs don't catch everyone doing copyright infringement straight away. Of course a constant offender with customs with copyright infringment or police with speeding will sooner or latter get caught.

Those importing products that are copyright infringing that do it for a long time it serous question when different countries customs catch them not if.