The attorneys advising members of the ZoL project and various ZoL users have consistently said that redistributing binaries is alright. The only reason few of us do it is because there are just too many binary kernel builds to reasonably support via published binaries.
The solution seems quite obvious to me in the case of the live cd:
Don't ship ZFS on it.
The overwhelming majority of users reliant on a CD-ROM drive to install a distro do not need nor want ZFS on their system.
Re:Big News for ZFS on Linux
by rcthompson on Monday March 07, 2016 @04:47PM
(#11241990)
I disagree. As one example, Apple ships Time Machine with their OS. With ZFS you could theoretically implement the same thing only better. Automatic snapshots enabled by default, with optional replication to an external hard drive for backup, could easily be a headline feature for a new version of Ubuntu. Not to mention ZFS compression enabled by default to get more use out of tiny laptop SSDs.
Certainly not everyone needs it, but I think there's a definite use case for ZFS (or btrfs, or any similar filesystem) on an ordinary desktop system, even if the user doesn't know what ZFS is.
Not theoretically, since it has been done. It is called LifePreserver and originated with PC-BSD years ago; thus available on FreeBSD an FreeNAS as well.
I will have a good laugh if Ubuntu is porting it over as a "headline feature".
> With ZFS you could theoretically implement the same thing only better.
OpenSolaris had that as part of its Gnome file manager. It's even open source.
[1]: http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=zfs-dkms