Re:ZFS Licensing and Linux
by convivialdingo on Friday February 19, 2016 @02:27PM
(#11135907)
This is correct. I have sat in legal meetings over this a few times.
The only murky area is how much of the original port constitutes a derivative. I would argue that any legitimate working kernel module ported from one OS to another is enough to show derivation. Others may argue that any large amount of adapting from one kernel to another (e.g. NDIS drivers) creates a new work. The truth is somewhere in the middle.
re: #4 the Free Software Foundation goes to great pains to distinguish itself and free software from the Open Source Initiative and open source software, so whether the GPL violated or failed to violate a principle of open source software probably wouldn't keep Stallman up at night.
2. Canonical is not linking ZFS to the kernel. Doing that would mean there would be no need to load zfs.ko.
3. Under the definitions of derivative works used by every legal jurisdiction in the world, an port of a driver via a kernel module is insufficient to constitute a derivative work. This has been verified by many lawyers.
4. The GPL never provided the guarantees you seem to have thought it did. Providing them would violate clause #9 of the definition of open source software:
https://opensource.org/osd-annotated