Ubuntu Is Planning To Make The ZFS File-System A "Standard" Offering

[mjg59]

Would they be willing to talk to me? The last guy (someone studying to be an attorney) with whom I spoke who thought there might be a violation thought that the SPL was being used to circumvent GPL symbol export restrictions, which is not true. That might be the case with what you heard. It is hard to tell without dialogue.

Probably not unless you're paying them, but I can assure you that there was no misunderstanding of the technical details involved. But the reality is that we don't know whether ZoL is a derivative work or not. No court has ruled on a sufficiently close matter to have confidence in the judgement. We can both have beliefs about the likely outcome, but to assert outright that it's not a derivative work is unjustifiable. There is risk associated with shipping ZoL, just as there is in shipping any other GPL-incompatible module. Based on the legal advice you've received, you may feel that the risk is sufficiently small that you can ignore it. Others may reach different conclusions.

[FuturePilot]

UEFI requires a FAT32 file system to boot from.

You can still have a separate /boot partition. The only thing the FAT32 EFI partition has on it is the boot loader bits. The kernel and everything else is still in /boot on a native Linux file system.

I see no reason why you can't have a separate /boot partition and have / formatted as ZFS.

[ryao]

On ZoL itself.

Would they be willing to talk to me? The last guy (someone studying to be an attorney) with whom I spoke who thought there might be a violation thought that the SPL was being used to circumvent GPL symbol export restrictions, which is not true. That might be the case with what you heard. It is hard to tell without dialogue.

No. But you may note that Debian chose not to ship ZFS as part of main.

Debian is free to omit things from main for any number of reasons, so that does not seem relevant.

[mjg59]

Is that you making a potentially false equivalence between this and another case where you had their opinion or you having their actual opinion on ZoL itself?

On ZoL itself.

Can you provide names, bar numbers and actual written statements?

No. But you may note that Debian chose not to ship ZFS as part of main.

[ryao]

I have spoken to actual lawyers who have launched actual lawsuits in this field and who disagree with your position.

Is that you making a potentially false equivalence between this and another case where you had their opinion or you having their actual opinion on ZoL itself? Can you provide names, bar numbers and actual written statements?

A quick Google search suggests that the only attorney with an actual published opinion is this guy:

http://www.rtt-law.com/public/files/...te%20paper.pdf

His thinking is somewhat different than private opinions that I have had in that it relies on fair use, but he still concludes ZoL is fine. The ones with whom I have spoken directly took the stronger argument that a Linux port of ZFS is a derived work of OpenSolaris, not Linux.

Joerg Schilling in a comment on the CentOS FAQ names "the lawyers of Harald Welte" as stating that a ZFS port to Linux is fine too:

In contrary, well-known lawyers (e.g. the lawyers of Harald Welte) explained why a combination of a filesystem with the Linux kernel is not problem.

http://centosfaq.org/centos/native-zfs-on-linux/

I have heard that the ZFS Linux port is fine first hand from both an attorney at the US DoJ and an attorney at the FSFE, although the one at the FSFE thought that certain forms of advertising that are not used might be able to trigger the derived works clause. I can contact the one at the DoJ while I do not have contact information at the FSFE, but you can contact them for their opinion.

I have heard second hand from members of various organizations that the ZFS port passed their legal review. I know firsthand that it passed the Gentoo licensing team's review, although that was not subject to scrutiny from an actual attorney until the attorney who works at the US DoJ checked it for us on his own time. I will withhold names since some of this was said in private discussions, but I could ask various organizations to publish their legal analysis if I consider that necessary. Whether they do is another matter, but I would be surprised if none honor that request if I were to make it.

So far, I have found zero statements from actual attorneys to the contrary of what I have said, but I have had multiple attorneys confirm that my statements are correct either firsthand or through an intermediary.

[ryao]

A first court decision of this kind could come from Christoph Hellwig's case against VMware:
https://sfconservancy.org/linux-comp...wsuit-faq.html

It looks like VMWare incorporated GPLv2 code into one of their closed source binaries. That is very different from porting driver code to Linux via a LKM. I am confident that this has no relevance to ZFS, although I have not checked that with an attorney. A rulings about $X that is different from $Y should not affect $Y by virtue of them being different. Consequently, I see no need to confirm this with an attorney, although if you are unsure, I encourage you to ask one.

Since that you are also a Gentoo developer, you could ask the attorney who recently volunteered to review things for Gentoo (he has a bar number that can be checked). His opinions on licensing generally match mine because I went out of my way to understand the topic and be consistent what I have been told by actual attorneys. You are likely to hear the same thing from him that you heard from me.

[nils_]

A first court decision of this kind could come from Christoph Hellwig's case against VMware:
https://sfconservancy.org/linux-comp...wsuit-faq.html

This is however tried in German court. I think the question of jurisdiction might be interesting as well in cases like these.

[nils_]

UEFI requires a FAT32 file system to boot from.

Ewwwww! Gross!

[chithanh]

A first court decision of this kind could come from Christoph Hellwig's case against VMware:

https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/vmware-lawsuit-faq.html

[TiberiusDuval]

Because GRUB won't have it. FreeBSD folk went through a lot of pain in the ass to get it done on their non-GRUB end.

Umm I boot PC-BSD with its native GRUB2. Grub can support zfs as root system. (And yes hdd where my PC-BSD and its GRUB is installed does not have more than one partition. ZFS-partition.)