Re:The Future of ZFS in FreeBSD
by cyphar on Thursday December 20, 2018 @01:49AM
(#18722980)
> But Ubuntu figured it was ok to ship with zfs.
Having spoken to some Canonical folks involved in this discussion, basically it boils down to the fact that the SPL (Solaris Porting Layer, which converts Linux VFS APIs to Solaris ones for ZFS) is GPL licensed and that ZFS was developed entirely separately from Linux (and Torvalds has said he agrees with the latter point). It also helps that ZFS is free software.
Honestly I think their strategy is that it's very unlikely they'll get sued (not to mention the past 5-8 years of OpenZFS development was done without an Oracle CLA). IMHO the FSF is primarily against it because they think it might water down the GPL's effects.
Having spoken to some Canonical folks involved in this discussion, basically it boils down to the fact that the SPL (Solaris Porting Layer, which converts Linux VFS APIs to Solaris ones for ZFS) is GPL licensed and that ZFS was developed entirely separately from Linux (and Torvalds has said he agrees with the latter point). It also helps that ZFS is free software.
Honestly I think their strategy is that it's very unlikely they'll get sued (not to mention the past 5-8 years of OpenZFS development was done without an Oracle CLA). IMHO the FSF is primarily against it because they think it might water down the GPL's effects.