ZFS and GPL terror: How much freedom is there in Linux?
eerielinux.wordpress.com
ZFS and GPL terror: How much freedom is there in Linux?
1–10 of 21 posts
Re: ZFS and GPL terror: How much freedom is there in Linux?
#2Github deal <-- bribe or bullet
Re: ZFS and GPL terror: How much freedom is there in Linux?
#3Mir is not GPL. It's GPL+CLA. Tiny, but very important difference.
Re: ZFS and GPL terror: How much freedom is there in Linux?
#4Makes me wonder how long it will be before a license is codified that is as permissive as BSD/MIT/Apache2 but specifically prohibits using the code in copyleft code bases. The question has been posed elsewhere:
https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6234/is-there...
Re: ZFS and GPL terror: How much freedom is there in Linux?
#5No new territory is covered in this article. It's a lot of words that skips over the central question: are CDDL and GPL incompatible and if so what does that mean for the user?
The article addresses this the wrong way: >Sun deliberately made the CDDL incompatible with the GPL!
Doesn't matter whether it's deliberate or not. And it's not merely one opinion, it's GNU, FSF, SFC, Debian, Fedora - quite a lot I'm not going to list them all, who do consider CDDL a free software license, but also consider it incompatible with GPL.
I have yet to read anything from Linux developers or users that they don't like ZFS, quite the contrary. And the solution is distros won't package pre-built binaries, you have to compile it yourself. And it's not that difficult.
The article seems to argue that some Linux people in power hate ZFS (no evidence) and use CDDL GPL incompatibility as an excuse to keep it away from Linux users (again no evidence).
Re: ZFS and GPL terror: How much freedom is there in Linux?
#6"Pessimistic" is a good generalization of the GPL mindset in my opinion: "If I don't make this thing GPL then some greedy-bastard company will make a fortune off of my ideas and never give me a cut, credit, or contribute back."
Maybe, but it's a dim way of looking at other people.
Re: ZFS and GPL terror: How much freedom is there in Linux?
#7>Sun deliberately made the CDDL incompatible with the GPL!
>
>This is a claim supported primarily by one former employee of Sun. Others disagree. And even if it was verifiably true: What about Open Source values? Since when is the GPL the only acceptable Open Source license?
Lots of hand-waving and false equivalency here. We're not talking about "Open Source values", we're talking specifically about the Linux kernel. And the Linux kernel is GPLv2 licensed. The Software Freedom Conservancy analyzed the situation and determined that a GPL-licensed project cannot legally incorporate CDDL code into the binary[0].
FWIW, Ubuntu has done so anyway via a kernel module and yet has to be sued for it, but the Linux kernel project may still refrain from doing so out of an abundance of caution.
I believe someone else summed it up quite well when they said (paraphrasing), "Solaris intentionally made ZFS difficult to incorporate into Linux by the licensing, so the Linux developers are (understandably) tired of bending over backwards to try to accommodate ZFS."
[0]https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/feb/25/zfs-and-linux/
Re: ZFS and GPL terror: How much freedom is there in Linux?
#8"Pessimistic" is a good generalization of the GPL mindset in my opinion: "If I don't make this thing GPL then some greedy-bastard company will make a fortune off of my ideas and never give me a cut, credit, or contribute back." Maybe, but it's a dim way of looking at other people.
Remember that GPL is a product of the realities around the open source ecosystem when Bill Gates and Steve Balmer where CEOs on Microsoft.
Moreover the situation with some android OEMs that don't provide source code for their devices shows that this is still happening today.
Re: ZFS and GPL terror: How much freedom is there in Linux?
#9It is ironic that the very same license that tries to prevent greedy companies from stealing open-source code is also preventing code from said (former)greedy company to be contributed back.
Re: ZFS and GPL terror: How much freedom is there in Linux?
#10"Pessimistic" is a good generalization of the GPL mindset in my opinion: "If I don't make this thing GPL then some greedy-bastard company will make a fortune off of my ideas and never give me a cut, credit, or contribute back." Maybe, but it's a dim way of looking at other people.
It's just a legal document. We have laws against killing, doesn't mean we suspect everyone of being a murderer.