> As for using headers, few consider them to be subject to copyright and those that do would likely find a fair use case for using them for compatibility.
Except as it stands, Oracle have now won cases in the US courts that designate them copyrightable, have they not?
Re:ZFS Licensing and Linux
by zerocrates on Friday February 19, 2016 @02:11PM
(#11135771)
Oracle v. Google did break Oracle's way on API copyrightability, but the precedent is from the Federal Circuit (because there were also-appealed patent claims), and they wouldn't end up hearing most subsequent copyright cases... so it's all pretty murky at best.
Despite their occasional enthusiasm for overturning the Federal Circuit, the Supreme Court denied cert in the case, so this probably won't be settled any time soon.
That is restricted to the US, involved whether a compatible implementation could be made using them and offered the possibility that all such implementations were actually fair use. It really is not relevant unless you are discussing making a Linux kernel replacement under a different license using the Linux kernel headers. As far as I last heard from lawyers on this, it is not considered to affect anyone until the legal battle finishes and as far as I can tell, if a oracle manages to say this is not okay, they will be in far deeper trouble over their DTrace module that circumvents GPL symbol exports than ZFSOnLinux that restricts itself to an interface intended to allow proprietary modules.
Also, if it is not clear, this was raised inside Gentoo. There was a discussion involving this with myself, the ZoL project lead, the concerned developer and a member of the licensing team who had final call on the matter. The descriptions of what was being done and why it should be okay passed review.