> And honestly, there is no way I can merge any of the ZFS efforts until I get an official letter from Oracle that is signed by their main legal counsel or preferably by Larry Ellison himself that says that yes, it's ok to do so and treat the end result as GPL'd.
> Other people think it can be ok to merge ZFS code into the kernel and that the module interface makes it ok, and that's their decision. But considering Oracle's litigious nature, and the questions over licensing, there's no way I can feel safe in ever doing so.
> And I'm not at all interested in some "ZFS shim layer" thing either that some people seem to think would isolate the two projects. That adds no value to our side, and given Oracle's interface copyright suits (see Java), I don't think it's any real licensing win either.
I hate to point this out, but this only demonstrates Linux Torvalds doesn't know much about copyright law. Linus could just as easily say "I was wrong. Sorry! As you all know -- IANAL. It's time we remedied this stupid chapter in our history. After all, I gave similar assurances to the AFS module when it was open sourced under a GPL incompatible license in 2003."
Linus's other words on the matter[0]:
> But one gray area in particular is something like a driver that was
originally written for another operating system (ie clearly not a derived
work of Linux in origin). At exactly what point does it become a derived
work of the kernel (and thus fall under the GPL)?
> THAT is a gray area, and _that_ is the area where I personally believe
that some modules may be considered to not be derived works simply because
they weren't designed for Linux and don't depend on any special Linux
behaviour.
> I hate to point this out, but this only demonstrates Linux Torvalds doesn't know much about copyright law.
Maybe.
When I was young I had an honestly awful employment contract waved under my nose that I was expected to sign. It included waivers of "moral rights" - like the company was allowed to give credit for my work to someone else and lie and say I never contributed to a project I worked on. I felt weird about it, so I talked to some senior people I respected.
Some of the advice I got was that the existence of a signed contract only gave the employer cover to could sue me if they wanted to. But if a company starts suing ex-employees over things that sound capricious and unfair, even if they win the court case its an incredibly bad look. Doing so would probably cost them employees and customers. So in a very real sense, particularly awful terms would never be enforced anyway.
This cuts the other way when it comes to Linux, ZFS and Oracle. Imagine Linux includes ZFS in the kernel. Oracle decides that maybe they can claim that linux is thus a derived work of ZFS. Ridiculous, but that might be enough cover to start suing companies who use linux. If it went to court they might eventually lose. So they don't go after Google. They sue smaller companies. They sue Notion. They sue banks. They sue random YC companies right after a raise. And then they graciously offer to settle each time for a mere hundreds of thousands of dollars. Much less than the court case would cost.
It doesn't matter that they're legally in the wrong. Without a court case to demonstrate that they're wrong, they get to play mafia boss and make a killing. This really hurts Linux - which gets a reputation as a business liability. And thats what Linus wants to avoid.
I'm sure Apple has fantastic lawyers. It might surprise you to learn that Apple's lawyers came to the same decision as Linus. Apple was in the process of transitioning MacOS to ZFS when Oracle bought SUN (and by extension acquired ZFS). They'd done all the technical work to make that happen - and they were set to announce it at WWDC, launching ZFS as a headlining feature of the next version of macos. But after oracle got involved, they pulled the plug on the project and threw out all their work. We can only assume Apple's lawyers considered it too big of a legal liability. Even if they might have won the court case, they didn't want to take the risk. Cheaper in the long run to make their own ZFS-like filesystem (APFS) instead. So thats what they did.
It doesn’t need to make sense for oracle to use the threat of lawsuits to bully small companies. It doesn’t matter if it’s crazy if your pockets aren’t deep enough to survive the legal challenge.
I don’t blame people for deciding zfs isn’t worth the risk.
It's a shame some legalese is holding back this great filesystem in the Linux world. I've used ZFS on FreeBSD for 20 years or so and it's amazing, especially since it's been possible to use it as a root FS since about 10 years ago.
I wish the Sun legacy had been sold to a more ethical company, but at least the original ZFS was fully open source and there's nothing Oracle can do about it.
> And honestly, there is no way I can merge any of the ZFS efforts until I get an official letter from Oracle that is signed by their main legal counsel or preferably by Larry Ellison himself that says that yes, it's ok to do so and treat the end result as GPL'd.
> Other people think it can be ok to merge ZFS code into the kernel and that the module interface makes it ok, and that's their decision. But considering Oracle's litigious nature, and the questions over licensing, there's no way I can feel safe in ever doing so.
> And I'm not at all interested in some "ZFS shim layer" thing either that some people seem to think would isolate the two projects. That adds no value to our side, and given Oracle's interface copyright suits (see Java), I don't think it's any real licensing win either.
https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=189711&curpost...