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Red Hat acquires Permabit to put the squeeze on RHEL

bazza Silver badge

Canonical has had their lawyers go over the CDDL terms and they think they can get around the problems by distributing the ZFS module as a binary and distributing the source code separately. Before you jump in and say that "but the GPL says that etc., etc.", the problem isn't with the GPL, the problem is with CDDL. Their lawyers think that this still leaves some technical violations, but that Oracle would have difficulty bringing a case to court based on them.

Hang on, I thought the legal issue being considered by Canonical was whether they could distribute Linux with a ZFS kernel module. AFAIK (IANAL) there's no problem for Canonical from Oracle's direction in distributing OpenZFS under the CDDL license - the license is pretty clear, and FreeBSD / NetBSD seem to have no problems.

I suppose the issue is whether or not including ZFS as a kernel module in Linux counts as distributing ZFS under GPL, not CDDL (due to GPL's claim to extend to all linked code). However so long as Canonical aren't actually changing the CDDL license statement in the source code they clearly wouldn't be breaking CDDL. They will be upsetting Richard Stallman though...

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