I agree that statement is factually incorrect, but I still don't think it changes the overall information in my comment in any meaningful way. The actual risk is low, the risk if of GPL infringement, not of oracle suing you, and there are people who contest it on either side. Those are the key points, and those are true I believe.
> On the flip side, you'd have a really hard time arguing that the module should be licensed as GPL
That is the very thing that some people do argue, for example the sfconservancy people. As I note, canonical's lawyers take your view (and I personally agree), but it's not clearcut. The sfconservancy outline their reasoning clearly for why they think zfs.ko is a derived work of the linux kernel.
Re:ZFS for Dummies
by jakobson14 on Saturday September 09, 2023 @10:37PM
(#37452389)
The SFC can get stuffed. Their argument says nothing in particular about ZFS and is essentially "the kernel is GPL and therefore ALL modules MUST BE GPL.
Their stance isn't just rejected by nvidia and company, but also by the kernel devs most notably torvalds himself.
Torvalds himself has personally refuted the "linking inescapably means you're derived" point on multiple occasions, and yet here they are continuing to wave it around because that's how they wish it worked.
That's wrong, and misses fundamental information about the CDDL.
First, the CDDL gives absolutely no fucks how you licence a resulting binary. It only cares about the specific covered source files, and doesn't care what you bundle them with. So nobody would ever argue that the module should be licenced as CDDL.
On the flip side, you'd have a really hard time arguing that the module should be licensed as GPL.* Sure, there's maybe a GPL wrapper, but lots of modules are non-GPL even when they might feature such a wrapper. ie. nvidia. You also can't argue ZFS is a derived work of the kernel, which is really the crux of the issue. ZFS was first written on solaris, developed for several years on freeBSD, and remains neutral across 3-5 different supported OSs. There's nothing to indicate the GPL should have more claim over ZFS than the wrapper.
The one and only place you'll ever run into trouble is if you start trying to distribute ZFS *source code* in the kernel source tree, as a fully integrated part of the kernel. (EDIT: or compiled together in a single kernel binary, from said combined source) The CDDL doesn't care about the mixing but the GPL does. Literally everyone agrees this is a bad idea and nobody does it.
*Let's ignore for a moment for the moment that you *couldn't* since the GPL requires complete corresponding source code and you can't relicence the CDDL source code files.