Getting grubby with ZFS

Well, one difference is that the ZFS-patched version of grub-legacy is derived from the FSF code, so distributing it would require that they conform to the license of the upstream project.

So when they distributed their modified version of grub-legacy it must have been under at least one of GPLv2 and GPLv3. Both of these have some form of patent licensing language, so Oracle must have satisfied at least one of those clauses.