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Debian GNU/kFreeBSD: one more step towards a universal operating system

Posted Apr 23, 2009 16:25 UTC (Thu) by TRS-80 (subscriber, #1804)
Parent article: Debian GNU/kFreeBSD: one more step towards a universal operating system

Unfortunately ZFS and DTrace have been remove from the Debian package on the basis that the CDDL is imcompatible with the DSFG.

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Posted Apr 23, 2009 18:47 UTC (Thu) by ssam (subscriber, #46587) [Link]

if you mix freeBSD and the ZFS source, i guess the resulting code is CDDL and no longer BSD.

Debian GNU/kFreeBSD: one more step towards a universal operating system

Posted Apr 23, 2009 19:16 UTC (Thu) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]

What? <Zooko looks.>

"""
Sources/Binaries in the following directories are licensed under
DFSG-incompatible terms and were therefore removed from the package
(and disabled in the build system):

src/sys/compat/opensolaris
src/sys/contrib/dev/ath
src/sys/contrib/dev/nve
src/sys/contrib/dev/oltr
src/sys/contrib/opensolaris
src/sys/dev/hptmv
src/sys/dev/hptrr
src/sys/dev/rr232x

The following directories contained code that is itself free, but depends
on the above cited non-free sources and was also removed (and disabled):

src/sys/dev/ath
src/sys/dev/nve
src/sys/modules/ath
src/sys/modules/ath_hal
src/sys/modules/hptmv
src/sys/modules/hptrr
src/sys/modules/nve
src/sys/modules/oltr
src/sys/modules/rr232x
src/sys/modules/zfs
"""

Which one is dtrace? It looks like ZFS is excluded, not on the basis that CDDL is incompatible with DFSG, but on the basis that it *depends* on something which is DFSG-non-free.

Anyway, who says CDDL is DFSG-non-free? Hm, a quick google for "site:packages.debian.org COMMON DEVELOPMENT AND DISTRIBUTION LICENSE" suggests that it is considered acceptable to include CDDL-licensed software in Debian.

Debian GNU/kFreeBSD: one more step towards a universal operating system

Posted Apr 24, 2009 3:44 UTC (Fri) by TRS-80 (subscriber, #1804) [Link]

For FreeBSD 7.0 the majority of ZFS was in src/sys/contrib/opensolaris/uts/common/fs/zfs/ with src/sys/modules/zfs/ just having a makefile. For 7.1 ZFS is in src/sys/cddl/contrib/opensolaris/uts/common/fs/zfs/ and DTrace (which wasn't in 7.0) is in src/sys/cddl/contrib/opensolaris/uts/common/dtrace/. The copyright file is out of date anyway, since the paths have changed, so maybe they are including ZFS and DTrace now - the source tarball still has src/sys/cddl, but I can't find the resulting kernel packages to check.

As for CDDL being non-free, most of those results are Qt-style GPL license exceptions, with the notable exception of star, which is by Jörg "cdrecord" Schilling. The changelog says '* Disable GPL incompatible "zfs"' so maybe that's their reason.

Debian GNU/kFreeBSD: one more step towards a universal operating system

Posted Apr 24, 2009 14:39 UTC (Fri) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]

Yes, as far as I can tell, CDDL is accepted as DFSG-free by Debian, but it is GPL-incompatible. That's consistent with what the OSI and FSF say about CDDL.