The OpenZFS project launches

Posted Sep 18, 2013 9:46 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
In reply to: The OpenZFS project launches by salimma
Parent article: The OpenZFS project launches

I don't know, maybe. However, that's different from being sued over ZFS patents - the risk the OP was talking about, and the risk I was responding to. That risk doesn't exist if you use/distribute the Oracle ZFS code under the licence Sun^WOracle widely grants for it.

Re suing for CDDL/GPL incompatibility - any copyright holder could do that. That's nothing specific to Oracle. Indeed, Oracle possibly have less ability to sue on those grounds than others, as Ben pointed out.

Further, the incompatibilities between the CDDL and GPL are not terribly great. Philosophically, they are very close in intent. They differ mostly in technical details, e.g. the CDDL being explicit about patent rights and attempting to implement "patent MAD" (Sun having had bad experiences with being sued itself by patent holders), which the GPL (at that time, v2 was the latest) was very weak or quiet on. It'd be interesting to hear expert opinion on what impact that'd have on potential damages.

I certainly very strongly suspect any the damages would be *much* less than you'd get from losing a patent suit. I would be surprised if the CDDL/GPL incompatibility risks were anything but trivial compared to the risks of choosing to use Oracle ZFS patents *without* availing oneself of the licence to those patents offered by the CDDLed ZFS code. ;)

That said, most people will choose to avoid both those risks, of course. However, again, if you simply can not avoid those patents, then your smartest move may well be to avail of the CDDL licence to them, rather than avoid a perfectly good, free patent licence.

The OpenZFS project launches

Posted Sep 18, 2013 12:00 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (2 responses)

The CDDL license is a free software license that is incompatible with the GPL.

There is not much more to say about the subject then that.

It's not the first license to do that and it's not going to be the last. The only people that can do anything about it are either the Linux kernel developers or Oracle and that can only happen by them choosing to change the license.

The OpenZFS project launches

Posted Sep 19, 2013 5:54 UTC (Thu) by Blaisorblade (guest, #25465) [Link] (1 responses)

The project claims that they can distribute modules, just as anybody can distribute binary modules:
http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html#WhatAboutTheLicensingIssue

How viable is that? Is there still a point in using the presumably slower ZFS-FUSE?

The OpenZFS project launches

Posted Sep 19, 2013 16:46 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

I would expect that it's viable if you compile it yourself and they don't ship any GPL-originated code with their code.

That is as long as their code is not derivative of Linux kernel code then the GPL cannot apply because that is outside the scope of copyright owned by the various Linux kernel devs.

Presumably once it's compiled it's going to pull in code from the kernel it's compiled against and then it would be a derivative product and falls under the scope of the GPL license. The GPL license, of course, itself says that it's restrictions only apply to distributed code and nothing that you use yourself. Therefore it would be legal to combine CDDL code and GPL (and produce a derivative of both) code as long as you don't distribute it since GPL doesn't restrict in this sort of usage.

The key here is 'derivative'. This is a legal term with specific definitions that is in the USA copyright code. It's a core concept to the copyright law itself. What is and what is not derivative is ultimately up to a court to decide. It's actually very arbitrary and don't expect it to always make logical sense so there may be some unexpected 'gotchas' and is why people pay money for lawyers to help interpret (which I am not one of them).

But ultimately, as long as the OpenZFS are fairly careful, then it's perfectly legal to distribute the code that you need to build your own modules. This is similar to the situation with the Nvidia binary driver.

The OpenAFS file system drivers for Linux have similar legal situation also. It's distributed under the IBM Public License which the FSF claims is incompatible with the GPL.

From FSF's license comparison website: 'This is a free software license. Unfortunately, it has a choice of law clause which makes it incompatible with the GNU GPL.'

Pretty much the same boat as the CDDL for the subject under discussion. OpenAFS support is a pretty normal feature that distributions support.

ie:

% yum search openafs |grep $(uname -r)
kmod-openafs-3.10.11-200.fc19.x86_64.x86_64 : openafs kernel module(s) for
: 3.10.11-200.fc19.x86_64

Although you'd have to look at the code of OpenZFS vs OpenAFS and talk to a lawyer to be fairly sure. Some kernel modules will violate the GPL even if they were in source code format. It's a very case-by-case situation.