Software Freedom Conservancy: Distributing Linux With ZFS Is Illegal (phoronix.com) 379
LichtSpektren writes: Phoronix reports that Bradley M. Kuhn and Karen M. Sandler at the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFS) have posted a blog post today arguing that Canonical's plan to distribute Ubuntu 16.04 LTS "Xenial Xerus" with support for the ZFS file system violates the Linux kernel's GPLv2 license.
On February 18, Dustin Kirkland at Canonical wrote on his blog: "We at Canonical have conducted a legal review, including discussion with the industry's leading software freedom legal counsel, of the licenses that apply to the Linux kernel and to ZFS. And in doing so, we have concluded that we are acting within the rights granted and in compliance with their terms of both of those licenses...The CDDL cannot apply to the Linux kernel because zfs.ko is a self-contained file system module — the kernel itself is quite obviously not a derivative work of this new file system. And zfs.ko, as a self-contained file system module, is clearly not a derivative work of the Linux kernel but rather quite obviously a derivative work of OpenZFS and OpenSolaris. Equivalent exceptions have existed for many years, for various other stand alone, self-contained, non-GPL kernel modules. Our conclusion is good for Ubuntu users, good for Linux, and good for all of free and open source software."
The SFS's blog post of today states: "We are sympathetic to Canonical's frustration in this desire to easily support more features for their users. However, as set out below, we have concluded that their distribution of zfs.ko violates the GPL."
On February 18, Dustin Kirkland at Canonical wrote on his blog: "We at Canonical have conducted a legal review, including discussion with the industry's leading software freedom legal counsel, of the licenses that apply to the Linux kernel and to ZFS. And in doing so, we have concluded that we are acting within the rights granted and in compliance with their terms of both of those licenses...The CDDL cannot apply to the Linux kernel because zfs.ko is a self-contained file system module — the kernel itself is quite obviously not a derivative work of this new file system. And zfs.ko, as a self-contained file system module, is clearly not a derivative work of the Linux kernel but rather quite obviously a derivative work of OpenZFS and OpenSolaris. Equivalent exceptions have existed for many years, for various other stand alone, self-contained, non-GPL kernel modules. Our conclusion is good for Ubuntu users, good for Linux, and good for all of free and open source software."
The SFS's blog post of today states: "We are sympathetic to Canonical's frustration in this desire to easily support more features for their users. However, as set out below, we have concluded that their distribution of zfs.ko violates the GPL."
No winners here. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No winners here. (Score:5, Interesting)
As usual, it has less to do with the specific example as it has to do with precedents that may not be desirable. It seems like if you release these two things "separately", then nothing is wrong. However by including this other binary with this problematic license as part of a single distribution you are "apparently" breaking the terms of the GPLv2 which requires the distribution be under GPLv2.
Hairs can be split about what a "distrubution" is. I can add ZFS to my own system and not be wrong. Why cannot a script add ZFS to my system for me during install? When does it become a "distribution", given that most of us don't install from optical media anymore, and frequently download bits and pieces as we need them for our system anyway. I'm trying to see the evil here that this narrowly avoids, but I don't yet...provided the terms of the various pieces of software are still met on their own.
Re:No winners here. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the distinction of a distribution vs a software project. The distribution is heterogeneous: loaded with tons of open-source projects of different licenses. Maybe acknowledge this during the install process by having the user agree to the multiple licenses that are included in the distro.
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When you compile Linux+ZFS into one binary you must decide on a license for this binary.
This license can be neither GPL2 nor CDDL.
It's different if the user gets Linux+ZFS as two different source packages with
their respective licenses. Then the user can compile them into a binary
which he does not distribute, so there is no need for a license of that binary.
(This is the way Debian goes.)
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No one is combining Linux + ZFS into a single binary. Ubuntu has already said, over and over, that ZFS will be a separate kernel module (zfs.ko).
This is no different from how Nvidia drivers are distributed, and Nvidia's drivers are completely proprietary. They've been distributing them this way for well over a decade now.
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Re:No winners here. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're the reason the rest of us have to constantly write IANAL as if that's the only thing that makes it permissible to so much as clear your throat, when all that really needs to be clear is that we're capable of distinguishing A from B to any necessary degree.
"Having people cook their own pseudoephedrine is just another means of distributing methamphetamine."
Actually, no. What you actually distribute, and the end result of what people are perhaps likely to do with it are two entirely different things. This is not Hair Splitting 101 with a laser scalpel. This is retiring your flexible plastic picnic knife. There exist, of course, various ways to spin language to link these things together, if that is indeed desired. But then we should be analyzing that extra language, not wishing it into existence by waving our hands and muttering "kids there days".
Digression: Lawyers might make better guesses about the "necessary degree", but in practice lawyers are about as useful as political pundits empanelled on ISIS Today in speculating about the future will of the court. Maybe we should just all write CTLNKS instead (concerning the law, nobody knows shit). The main difference between critical thought at large and your lawyer is mainly that your lawyer can get into heaps of trouble by giving you a failing grade of shit. Pretty much the only thing I really want from intelligent agents of xmas future is to see the profession of law refactored, with all of their muddles and uncertainties hopelessly exposed to eternal ridicule, until we actually find in necessary to draft legislation to a sane standard (including an automated regression test suite, an unintended consequence verification gauntlet, and some Valgrind fuzz testing).
Back to the matter at hand, I completely disagree that this analysis should start with the semantics of static/dynamic linkage.
The real question should be this: if zfs.ko is erased from your system, does what remains function 99.99% the same way, minus only those features that zfs.ko provides?
With static linkage you can't do this, and thus you can't ask this question, either.
The key issue here is separability. What natural line exists between dynamic linkage and a ZeroMQ socket layer? And what about Joyent's "double hull" virtualization where ZFS is native to the underlying OS which provides a Linux API to the client OS? "Linking" is just indirection with more established history. And we all know you can solve every problem in computer science with another layer of indirection, except for too many layers of indirection.
I think my "separability" question above is far more likely to be legally productive, but then IANAL YMMV & CTLNKS.
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Nope, haven't compiled an nvidia driver for 1-2 years. Getting the compiled binary for quite some time.
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FSF has been claiming that (with DLLs and Java .class files), but it was never actually tested in court.
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Nonsense. Loading a module ("linking it") into the kernel makes a single binary, that is unambiguous.
Bull.
Assuming one is not actively using ZFS and removed all traces of the library and its tools, will the system work the same as before?
If so (and this is readily apparent), then the library is separate. If it is under a separate license and this is understood by the user/admin at the time of install, who cares? I don't.
I'm pretty sure that if you look at the several other file systems that have been supported by Linux over the years, more than one have had different license terms.
Wow, I'm just floored by the lack of understanding I see here. Look, a Linux kernel module is just a chunk of memory saved on disk along with some information needed to fix up the bytes that need to change in order to run it at some particular place in memory. To load it, Linux just copies the contents of the module from and does the necessary fixups. There is no question whatsoever that the result of that is a single binary. That's just basic computer science. Very very basic. Very very very basic.
As for w
Re:No winners here. (Score:4, Interesting)
Nope, not at all.
The Nvidia driver (nvidia.ko) lives in kernel space, and links to the kernel. It also links to a small GPL-licensed "shim" driver, because the Nvidia driver is a proprietary blob (and likely very close to their Windows driver architecturally), and the kernel changes frequently. So that they don't have to maintain a different proprietary blob version for every single kernel version out there (which would be a daunting task, given all the kernel versions and all the different subversions and variants made by all the distros), they have a single blob, and then the shim gets compiled for the kernel on the target system, and links the two.
Inter-process communication would be a disaster for something very high-performance like a 3D video driver.
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Inter-process communication would be a disaster for something very high-performance like a 3D video driver
For the nVidia driver (for cards from the last 5 or so years), that also includes communication between userspace and the kernel. Nothing in the kernel driver is on the critical path for performance. The kernel driver is responsible for mapping device rings into userspace and setting up memory mappings. Everything else goes directly from userspace to the hardware. The userspace driver writes data to shared buffers and sends commands into the memory-mapped ring buffer, then pokes a couple of memory mappe
Lawyer: Linux is not *quite* GPL (Score:5, Informative)
I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advice. If you want legal advice, pay my retainer.
There is a *really* big hole in the analysis.
Linux is *not* quite GPL; it, like many others, is better understood as "quasi-GPL", or QGPL.
Since pretty much the beginning, the Linux developers approved, condoned, and encouraged binary, non-GPL modules. Standard legal analysis means that this trumps the boilerplate of the license/contract.
The second serious error is arguing about the FSF position on linking. Under the rules of legal analysis, the author of a document's opinion is weighted at pretty much nothing: the author had his chance, and later comments are irrelevant. That is, there are about 7 billion people whose opinions on interpreting it come first.
Now whether distributing Linux with that module violates Sun's CDL could be an entirely different issue; I've never looked at it.
hawk, esq.
Linking (Score:3)
Reminds me of a related issue: the FSF's position on linking (which will not impact the issue at hand: ZFS in Ubuntu, but has been raised in different contexts).
Basically, WordPress allows non-GPL modules even though WordPress itself is GPL. The FSF does not like that, and they hold that to extend a GPL application, every extension must be GPL, and they invoke the linking interpretation. Drupal on the other hand, takes the position that all modules must be GPL.
The linking interpretation makes sense when you
Re:Lawyer: Linux is not *quite* GPL (Score:4, Interesting)
It's definitely a mess, but so is just about anything where the GPL has been around.
As for authority and jurisdiction: the Common Law of England goes back to the twelfth century, and has been passed on to substantially all English speaking countries (I forget the exceptions). The principles of construction predate this country, and are pretty much the same through the english speaking world.
Frankly, if someone wanted to litigate this, it would be an utter mess. The unwritten changes that *did* become part of the license would be binding upon all later contributions, and attach to them. It is quite possible that different parts have different licenses--and that the whole body of the kernel couldn't be distributed together. *noone* wants to open *that* can of worms . . .(except maybe redmond :)
hawk
Re:Lawyer: Linux is not *quite* GPL (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, while I'm at it, to the extent that some invited, while others tolerated, aside from introducing different licenses with the problem that that creates, leads to the issue of "estoppel"--a situation in which one cannot assert a position, even if legally entitled to do so, do to his prior actions and/or the reliance of another upon those actions. (and for those who care, estoppel is an equitable principle, not a legal principle, having come from the Chancery Courts of England).
All in all, anyone who thinks that they would like the results of the litigation is deluding himself . . .
hawk
Re:Lawyer: Linux is not *quite* GPL (Score:4, Informative)
You seem to be unaware that in every case where the GPL has been litigated, it has been upheld. You talk about common law, surely you understand how this rich body of legal precedent has buttressed the strength of the GPL. As for estoppel, it's not enough for some of the copyright holders to make a habit of looking the other way. All of them would need to, and that simply hasn't happened.
Re:Lawyer: Linux is not *quite* GPL (Score:4, Insightful)
"Legal advice" is a formal term, defined by law, and it's actually illegal to offer it if you're not a lawyer in many places. Furthermore, for a lawyer, giving such advice can be constituted as establishing an attorney-client relationship, which results in legal obligations for the lawyer. So, even ignoring the time and effort, it's never free for them. I would assume there is some kind of insurance that exist specifically to indemnify lawyers in cases where they become subject to such obligations; and, naturally, that insurance is not free.
Software developers, on the other hand, don't establish this kind of relationship with the user merely by virtue of writing software for them. At least, not any more so than anyone else providing any other service does.
(I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.)
Enforcement of GPL is a gain (Score:3)
Copyright holders who license under a free software license gain compliance and social respect for choosing a license that lets us run, share, and modify covered software. There is nothing to gain in saying popular GNU/Linux distributions don't have to comply with licenses but other distributors do. There is also a lot to gain by showing that licensing under a popular free software license (such as the GNU GPL) is enforcible. One such benefit: Every enforcement action taken showing how enforcible the GPL is
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The difference is using internal API vs external API.
If its using an internal API its part of the kernel.
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I'm not sure what anyone would stand to gain by arguing that Ubuntu is violating the GPLv2 license.
Btrfs developers. ZFS on Linux makes alternatives less important and fewer people/companies invest time/money into creating that software.
Then again, as TFA says: Oracle, why don't you just relicense the bloody thing.
Re:No winners here. (Score:4, Insightful)
Making ZFS incompatible with linux was the whole point of putting it under the CDDL from the start.
That said, having run ZFS since pretty much the start on Solaris servers here, it has to be the most overhyped piece of software ever released. Initially it was pretty much unusable for things like database loads, it was unstable as hell and had serious memory usage issues. These days, the glaring problems are largely fixed, but in an enterprise environment most of its features are of limited use as most of the storage will be on centralized SAN/NAS arrays anyway.
The whole discussion is one of those that gives me flashbacks to the 90's, same as when some database guy specifies that they want their volumes on this many striped spindles...
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Having another non-GPL thing in the mix, after X, apache, nvidia and so on annoys them.
It would be a non-story without such agitation.
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I'm not sure what anyone would stand to gain by arguing that Ubuntu is violating the GPLv2 license. It seems kind of ridiculous.
I think the argument against it is a political one, not a legal question.
Ubuntu having reviewed it by lawyers, I would feel comfortable that what they are doing is on the up-and-up.
The 'Software Freedom Conservancy (SFS)' is an activist organization.
They have an ideological stance against that which is non-GPL, even if what is being done is legal, they don't like what
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I'm not sure what anyone would stand to gain by arguing that Ubuntu is violating the GPLv2 license. It seems kind of ridiculous.
large companies - whether they are software libre companies like redhat or canonical, or proprietary companies like HP or Samsung - are supposed to be the "shining example" of what laws individuals are expected to follow. when those large companies are also making their money out of software libre, it is even *more* important that they set a good example.
otherwise what happens is that smaller companies - and chinese and other asian companies across the world - go "oh look: canonical's lost its rights to di
Re:No winners here. (Score:4, Informative)
The article explains why it is not ridiculous.
Everybody in the free software community benefits from strong GPL enforcement. E.g., when Microsoft reused GPL code in one of their tools, they were forced to release their source when it was discovered.
The ZFS license forbids releasing it under GPL. The Ubuntu binary distribution must be all GPL in order to satisfy the GPL's requirements.
If Ubuntu starts picking which parts of the license it follows, you can bet everyone from minor devs to major corporations will start doing the same thing. Proprietary shops will absorb open source contributions in whatever predatory manner they can.
The way to prevent it is simple. Enforce 100% of the requirements in the open source license 100% of the time, and set legal precedent whenever possible to establish those obligations as legally binding.
bunch of hot air - use FreeBSD then? (Score:2)
I happen to like using ZFS.
But fine, distributing drivers with binary blobs is OK, while this little license incompatibility between two open-source projects is a big deal. Whatever, dudes.
Re: bunch of hot air - use FreeBSD then? (Score:3)
Thanks to Oracle's ruling on Java a clean room implementation of ZFS is still owned by Oracle as the API and keywords are owned.
No distro outside Solaris is safe and could open your employer to liability from an Oracle audit
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No distro outside Solaris is safe and could open your employer to liability from an Oracle audit
I see this mistake repeated over and over in every licensing discussion on Linux and ZFS. The CDDL is not the license crying foul here, so Oracle has no standing to sue. It's the GPL that is trying to infect the CDDL'd code and the CDDL won't let it, hence the incompatibility. IOW, if anybody wanted to file suit, it'd have to come from the Linux side, not the Oracle side. I'll let you imagine the media fallout over anybody who would attempt to sue Canonical for including a piece of open source software in t
SFS? More like FFS... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why oh why do we have to keep shooting ourselves in the foot?
OK I'm a BSD user so, well, stones and glass houses, but even so the open source community's continuing ability to why things should not be allowed is depressing...most people in our crowd want our stuff to be USED by as many people as possible...
Re:SFS? More like FFS... (Score:5, Informative)
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Why oh why do we have to keep shooting ourselves in the foot?
OK I'm a BSD user so, well, stones and glass houses, but even so the open source community's continuing ability to why things should not be allowed is depressing...most people in our crowd want our stuff to be USED by as many people as possible...
copyright law and the GPL are there for very good reasons. i've posted about this before, but a simple scenario which can easily be demonstrated as a real-world "nightmare scenario" that should tell you why you are mistaken is: security vulnerabilities in smartphones.
let's take a simple GPL-violating Mediatek smartphone (for example the Fairphone 1). Fairphone created their first phone to reduce e-waste and also to tackle conflict materials problems and to provide factory workers with fair working conditi
I don't see the advantage of objecting (Score:3)
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Watch how quickly those lines get replaced, and how that guy can't get a job afterward.
It isn't features, it is stability + features (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux does not have a stable file-system and volume manager that can come anywhere near the performance and stability of ZFS.
Re: It isn't features, it is stability + features (Score:2)
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Sure and I don't have a problem with BSD nor am I complaining about Linux or the GPL. The problem here is we have different attorneys both are biased saying different things about including ZFS and really the only people that get an opinion is Canonical and Oracle.
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All filesytems have the same stability. It's their implementation that can be buggy.
Is the linux ZFS implemention more stable than its BTRFS implementation? And if so, does it matter for the 99% of us who are fine with EXT4 (and even EXT3)?
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Yes, Linux ZFS is more stable than BTRFS.
And if ext4 works for you great but comparing ext4 to zfs is like comparing a pinto to a corvette.
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Well, the reason for that is that the filesystems make different tradeoffs. ext4 has journalling, but no means to detect corruption of data blocks. It's faster because it's simple and less safe. ZFS is slower because it provides additional features, such as block-level checksumming or hashing, including transparent repair when the volume type allows it, and can also compress blocks. It does a whole lot more as well, and while those features are really nice, they don't come for free--there's a performanc
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Also, is there anything blocking a clean-room GPLv2 implementation of ZFS for Linux?
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But they had time to create BTRFS? I understand it was easier than to clone ZFS?
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
SFS/FSF does not get to rule on GPL (Score:4, Insightful)
The Linux Foundation, as the copyright holder of the Linux kernel, gets to determine what is and is not allowed.
This is matter does not involve Software Freedom Conservancy (SFS) or Free Software Foundation (FSF), they are are not even parties to the copyright license used for the Linux kernel.
In my professional opinion, Canonical can feel free to tell SFS to go pound sand.
Re:SFS/FSF does not get to rule on GPL (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. The SFC is not the owner of either of the works in question and is not the author of the license in question. They have no stake or standing in the matter.
As authors of the GPL itself, I would say that Stallman or the FSF do have some say in the matter.
The SFC can go pound sand...
Re:SFS/FSF does not get to rule on GPL (Score:5, Insightful)
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Oracle's terms aren't violated, so there is no reason for them to sue.
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They do have a stake in creating press releases, for the sake of creating press releases though.
And this article and subsequent conversation is the direct result of that.
Re:SFS/FSF does not get to rule on GPL (Score:5, Informative)
The SFC is not the owner of either of the works in question and is not the author of the license in question. They have no stake or standing in the matter.
It seems they do have a stake:
The GPL Compliance Project for Linux Developers is comprised of copyright holders in the kernel, Linux, who have contributed to Linux under its license, the GPLv2. These copyright holders have formally asked Conservancy to engage in compliance efforts for their copyrights in the Linux kernel. In addition, some developers have directly assigned their copyrights on Linux to Conservancy, so Conservancy also enforces the GPL on Linux via its own copyrights in Linux.
From https://sfconservancy.org/copy... [sfconservancy.org]
Re:SFS/FSF does not get to rule on GPL (Score:4, Informative)
Canonical only announced their intention and encouraged SFC to speak out because if law suites because now is the time to find out if any interested parties are going to sue... prior to actually starting and getting sued
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They can say what the fuck they want, and it has whatever weight the Linux kernel devs want to assign to it.
Re:SFS/FSF does not get to rule on GPL (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:SFS/FSF does not get to rule on GPL (Score:4, Informative)
In any case though, the copyright holders get to determine what licenses or permissions to grant over the work, they don't get to then decide how the license should be interpreted - that's up to an arbitrator or a court. If Canonical's lawyers are incorrect in their interpretation then someone will need to bring a court case to have it resolved.
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(automotive analogy) :-)
Linus doesn't object to binary kernel modules (Score:5, Insightful)
Hilarious (Score:4, Insightful)
>The FSF, stewards of the GPL, have stated many times over the past decades that they believe there is no legal distinction between dynamic and static linking of a C program and we agree.
The FSF is almost certainly wrong in this. Linking isn't going to even be considered in a court room. What they *will* consider is whether or not zfs.ko contains derivative work from Linux. Headers are now subject to copyright (as is my understanding) so it's very possible that it does. However, if they use "api-only" headers, such as posix stuff and it does not rely on being compiled against the GPL-ed version of the headers, then they are most likely going to be free and clear of any issues.
Personally, the SFC can go eat a bag of dicks and die in a fire.
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Remember what Stallman said about Jobs - ""I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Let that be Stallman's epitaph.
What's the Conservancy's role in this? (Score:5, Informative)
Reading their piece, they sound like they are lawyers looking for a client, like they want to take Canonical to court over this. One likes to think that anyone who defends OSS must be on the side of the light, but I note that the Conservancy sued companies using Busybox over the objections of at least some of the copyright holders. This quote is kind of interesting:
"But that didn't stop them from creating a self-funding legal machine where they never found any actual useful code that should have gone upstream, but they still demanded $15k or so in legal fees each time so they could go sue the next company."
For those who didn't RTFA, the core of the question is this: Is a Linux distro that contains a ZFS module a combined product, derived from Linux and/or ZFS? Or are they two independent items that happen to be delivered in the same package. The Conservancy states "we have yet to encounter a Linux module that — when distributed in binary form — did not, in our view, yield combined work with Linux", and then they go on to say that the intend to "exhaust every diplomatic option...before seeking resolution from the courts".
Only: nobody is asking them to take anyone to court. If Oracle doesn't like this (they are the primary holder of ZFS copyrights), I'm sure they have their own lawyers. So WTF is going on here? Instead of a patent troll, maybe we have a GPL troll?
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they are asking Oracle to release ZFS under GPLv2 (or anything compatible)
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A grey area Oracle might exploit (Score:3, Interesting)
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I'm afraid that I don't see GPL(2) as "fully open" because it deliberately nobbles some (to my mind entirely legitimate) uses of the software, as in this whole issue in fact. Which is why I prefer to license under Apache 2 (or BSD, etc) to give users of code I create (or pay to be created) as wide a range of choices as to what they do with it as I can.
Cue GPL vs permissive licence wars... 3... 2... 1...
The point here is the GPL2 is not some global universal agreed maximum of "freedom". It is a local maxim
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Except in this case the GPL is the restrictive license, not the CDDL. Oracle has no grounds to file suit since their terms aren't being violated. It's that pesky GPL getting in the way, since CDDL isn't their brand of 'free' software it must be evil.
Software Freedom Conspiracy (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to side with Canonical on this one. Their short and sweet post pretty much puts to bed the legal ramblings of the Software Freedom Conservancy. The SFS article reads like they started out trying to make a point, then has to fallback on an academic lesson on GPL Incompatibility and Combined/Derivative works. I would go so far as to say their verbosity defeats their own argument, while managing to inset the letters "ZFS" wherever they can find room.
Past that, as someone who uses ZFS on FreeBSD, ZFS is pretty fucking useful. Canonical's legal inclusion of ZFS as self-contained file system module is a big step forward for Linux.
"Illegal" is misleading (Score:3)
More accurate would be: "could give rise to a civil cause of action." We usually say that something is "illegal" when it violates criminal law, or some other statue passed by the legislature for a public purpose. Violating contract or license terms is not illegal in this sense. Any legal risk comes from the willingness of the aggrieved party to pursue a remedy. Crucially, there is no public stake in enforcing these rights: if the rightsholder does not want to pursue a remedy, nobody else will care. This is in contrast to activities which are prohibited by statue: the public at large has an interest in prohibiting these activities because they are bad for everyone for one reason or another. It's true that this claim could be based in copyright, which is a "creature of statue" so to speak, but copyright itself is designed to be enforced only by private parties. And more importantly, in this case the text of the license would be the determinative factor.
Anyhow, it's just a semantic niggle, but it really annoys me when people write deliberately misleading headlines like "flashing your firmware is now illegal," when they are really just talking about private causes of action based on licenses or private contracts. In fact, the word "illegal" does not appear at all in TFA.
is it a derived work? (Score:2)
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There's a hell of a difference between static linking (the code is included in the final binary) and what we refer to dynamic linking, which is code we can optionally load into memory, executed, and then dumped, mix, lather, repeat. That same code can also be loaded by other programs, so it certainly is not part of the first one to load it.
But then again, what do you expect from a couple of lawyers?
New Moderators wanted anyone? (Score:2)
The summary dedicated 3x more space to a previous Canonical blog, than to the actual article being discussed in the Headline. Way to go!
btrfs (Score:2)
ZFS can be replaced by btrfs in many cases. Yes ZFS is more mature and has more of a track record. But only by people using btrfs will it gain that level of testing in production environments. It is quite stable now and OK some may have data that they just can't bring themselves to trust away from XFS or ext4 or ZFS but I think it's time to look at alternatives to ZFS.
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I've tried them all many times, and thrashed them all. Btrfs trashed its filesystems on more than one occasion. How many times do I get seriously burned by it before I say "enough is enough", and turn my back on it. Well, about four times to date. Then I discovered ZFS.
ZFS rules. I've used it on Linux and now for the last two and a bit years on FreeBSD as well. It's everything Btrfs should have been, and much more. It works. It's robust. It has actual documentation and tools that work as documented
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Anyone who trusts their data to ext4 is grossly misinformed and playing with fire. Almost any other filesystem with a journal is less likely to eat your data than ext4. If you're using ext4 it should be for data that you really don't care if you lose / if the system running it crashes until you have a chance to reboot. In other words, it's fine for laptops where people check mail and browse facebook, but it has absolutely no place in the datacenter.
It is no different than Minix AFS (Score:3)
Historically, there's been things like the original Andrew filesystem
module: a standard filesystem that really wasn't written for Linux in the
first place, and just implements a UNIX filesystem. Is that derived just
because it got ported to Linux that had a reasonably similar VFS interface
to what other UNIXes did? Personally, I didn't feel that I could make that
judgment call. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't, but it clearly is a gray
area.
Personally, I think that case wasn't a derived work, and I was willing to
tell the AFS guys so.
http://yarchive.net/comp/linux... [yarchive.net]
ZFS was clearly developed for a different operating system, and I don't think Linus would care. If he does, I'd like to see something he has written on the subject.
Unless there is a copyright holder with reason and "standing" to sue, there is no violation.
Re:Software Freedom? (Score:5, Insightful)
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So you don't have freedom of speech?
I didn't say that. I didn't even mention speech. I said freedoms are limited, and the freedom of speech is no exception. There are limits to the things you can say.
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OP said that "All X are Y."
I countered that by saying that X1 is not Y. Which therefore contradicts OP's original statement.
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Now Twitter or Facebook or Slashdot can remove people from their service for whatever reason. If we run a blog and find a contributor to be abusive or simply annoying we can remove him from our service and this is not a freedom of speech issue.
Now if I slander you. The government cannot prosecute me for saying what I said but YOU can say that my slander caused you financial harm
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Who is making changes to anything?
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Actually, you don't need to make up crazy analogies about worms and apples and beans here. Just look at how the Nvidia proprietary kernel modules are shipped, and how they've been shipped for over a decade now. Nvidia's driver also links to the kernel as a dynamically-loaded module (nvidia.ko). Is anyone complaining? Outside of a few extremists, no.
This situation with ZFS is no different than the situation with Nvidia.
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Re:Software Freedom? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, Software Freedom means that you can't do what you want with your software? Is this one of those Richard Stalin - I mean, Stallman - groups or something?
If you didn't write it, it's not your software. You can acquire the right to use it in exchange for your agreement to the terms of the license. The freedom part comes in where the terms of the license say that you get to modify and distribute it without anyone's permission. Again, in exchange for your agreement to the terms of the license.
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Which reminds me: here's something from "Life of Brian" that stuck in my mind when I saw it the other day:
[the members of "The People's Front of Judea" are sitting in the amphitheatre; Stan has just announced that he wants to be a woman and wants to be called "Loretta," and is explaining why]
Stan: I want to have babies. ... you can't HAVE babies!
Reg: You want to have babies?!?!
Stan: It's every man's right to have babies if he wants them.
Reg: But
Stan: Don't you oppress me!
Reg: I'm not oppressing you, Stan. You haven't got a womb! Where's the foetus gonna gestate? You gonna keep it in a box?
So, I don't want to use proprietary software, I just want the right to use proprietary software, even if I can't use proprietary software. Waitaminute...I actually do that all the time. So it looks like the "Reg" in my own story hasn't actually succeeded in oppressing me...
Re:Software Freedom? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not like Stallman makes no sense. Imagine 2 societies. Society A in which you are free to enter into any contract want, and society B which is exactly like Society A except that contracts that involve slavery are not legal. Which society has more freedom?
Society A provides the additional freedom to to sell oneself into slavery, so society A is more free.
Society B lacks the freedom to to sell oneself into slavery, so society B is more free.
Which of these statements is true? It's just a pointless semantic debate that depends on your personal definition of a "free society". Is agreeing to use commercial software similar selling yourself into slavery? Not really, but I think it's still an appropriate analogy even if the magnitude of the consequences are not comparable.
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If I may adapt the quote above from Mr. Orwell, I think you just said "Freedom is Licensing Restrictions."
I don't think licensing restrictions are necessary bad - let's just not adopt doublethink along the way. Then again, I fully respect your freedom to doublethink as much as you want. ;-)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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I've had arguments with this guy. He has definitely said things to that effect. A less-direct statement to that effect is written into the preamble of the GPLv2; I've only ever gotten the full potato out of RMS by arguing with him directly about the MIT and BSD licenses. The man could feed the Irish.
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mount