Earlier quoted context omitted.
> why hasn't Torwalds spawned a Linux license he's fully on board with? Changing a licence in an open source project can be difficult. Unless you've specifically had all contributors sign away their ownership of their contribution, then you can't change the licence without their permission, as they've only given permission for their contribution to be used under the current licence. When you have 1000s of contributor…
I can see that. Here's why I think it could work nonetheless: (1) Torwalds is one of the people able to drum up the OSS community. If people hated him so much as to not follow him on a technical detail, they'd develop for BSD rather than Linux. (2) the reason GPLv3 has mostly failed seems to be mostly due to the controversial nature of the changes while the change for more compatibility with another free license seem…
The GPL normally has a clause that says the source code has to be licensed under "this license or a newer version of the GPL". Projects that have moved from GPLv2 to GPLv3 did so because of this clause in the license. Torvalds specifically removed this clause.
I doubt Torvalds is concerned about whether or not users can use ZFS. He's defended the existence of closed source kernel modules (ex graphics drivers, network drivers). There's even the quote in the article that Torvald's didn't consider Andrew File System derivative of the kernel. Further, users can use ZFS-FUSE; there's no question that ZFS-FUSE doesn't infringe. Finally, Oracle owns sole copyright to ZFS; they can re-licence it.
Linux will never move from GPLv2 and I'd be really surprised if Torvalds saw the ZFS issue as a problem with the GPLv2 and not an Oracle problem.