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A comment on ZFS for Dummies. Parent comment

Re:ZFS for Dummies by TheDong on Saturday September 09, 2023 @07:35AM (#37444211)
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.

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/feb/25/zfs-and-linux/

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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.

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