Correct, Oracle would be in a position to do exactly that. Whether they do or not is another story but thats a pretty big liability.
Given they are discontinuing Solaris and all-in on Red Hat Enterprise Linux I can't help but wonder why they don't do more with ZFS on Linux and therefor wonder if the NetApp patent suits or some other patent suit is preventing them from doing anything in the background.
Many people don't realise that these crappy patent suits in the background prevent all sorts of really basic stuff, like the fact most things now bounce through a cloud server (like Facetime) because there's a patent troll for peer-to-peer communications. And it's causing total waste as a result :( It also seems likely that prevented facetime becoming an open standard as Apple original promised. This is only 1 example though.
This may be true, but when Oracle killed OpenSolaris, my non-Sun/Oracle friends wrote off Solaris and moved off it.
Killing OpenSolaris, and talking up SPARC so much, made people think that a) Larry just wants to vendor lock them, b) doesn't care about x86 support because it makes vendor lock-in harder for Oracle, c) the OpenSolaris derivative community will not be able to compete with Linux. So everyone has grudgingly accepted that Linux is it for the enterprise Unix market.
I hate this as much as you do. I <3 Solaris/Illumos. Illumos derivatives have their niches, no doubt, and I want to be able to use them much more. But that's not how business people think.
I'm not sure that Oracle could turn this impression around at this point. To begin with it would have to restart OpenSolaris, and that might not be enough. OpenSolaris greatly helped Sun overcome resistance to Solaris, but it only went so far, so Oracle will have to do even more work to make Solaris' future bright.
But presumably, as copyright holders, Oracle is the entity that could try to enforce CDDL in court, in particular breaking the CDDL by mixing in GPL code in the same (ie: OS) distribution? Oracle goes: we bought Sun, and hold copyright to ZFS (also at the point of the OpenZFS fork) - RedHat could respond: we got a license - the CDDL - and Oracle could respond, sure - but CDDL isn't compatible with GPL - so you're in breach of the CDDL?
>But presumably, as copyright holders, Oracle is the entity that could try to enforce CDDL in court, in particular breaking the CDDL by mixing in GPL code in the same (ie: OS) distribution?
Any Linux contributor could also try to enforce it, which is why the license incompatibility is the issue stopping them. Oracle holds no special power.
True - but the incentives are a bit different. How many other Linux contributors[1] are selling a commercial operating system in direct competition with Linux as a general purpose Unix-like OS, with ZFS as one of the differentiating features?
Most Linux contributors want Linux to succeed. I don't think it's at all clear that corporate Oracle prefers Linux to succeed - at least not if higher adoption of Solaris is an alternative.
[1] (I guess IBM and Microsoft come to mind... but they don't have any special investment in ZFS)
There are thousands of Linux contributors, I don't care enough to check but I have to imagine Oracle has employed at least one. Any one of them could sue, and several have mentioned they're considering the option.
The license issue is what's keeping Red Hat from using ZFS, not some rivalry with Oracle.
CDDL says: Source code must be licensed under CDDL.
GPL says: Source code must be licensed under GPL.
If you follow the conditions of GPL, you are violating the condition of the CDDL. If you are following the conditions of CDDL, you are violating the GPL. Basic binary logic.
To add: "the engineers who had written the Solaris kernel requested that the license of OpenSolaris be GPL-incompatible". A license is really just an written intention of the author on what conditions copyright law restrictions may be legally ignored. In this case, those wishes had a very explicit intention. However those using the license today has had a general change of heart, and those with GPL interest has a general stance that no FOSS project will ever sue an other FOSS project over license incompatibility. As such, the risk of lawsuit is really just a company suing an other company under the technicality of incompatibility.
Naturally some organizations won't intentionally break copyright law just because no one will sue.
Neither license forbids mixing with other licenses. As long as the demands of both are met, they can apply to the same source code.
>If you are following the conditions of CDDL, you are violating the GPL. Basic binary logic.
Relationship between licenses can be transitive but not commutative.
As far as I know CDDL allows using with code under GPL but GPL does not allow using code under CDDL. CDDL copyright owners have no case, GPL copyright owners have.
The question is: If I'm incorrect, what in CDDL prevents using with GPL?
If CDDL has no issue with GPL conditions, then follow the GPL and everything is fine.
CDDL has this text: "Any Covered Software that You distribute or otherwise make available in Executable form must also be made available in Source Code form and that Source Code form must be distributed only under the terms of this License"
So you take some CDDL code, and some GPL code, and you put that whole new source code tree under GPL in order to fullfill the GPL license condition. Are you then in compliance with the CDDL code? My concussion is that you are not, as that would be in conflict with the above condition of the CDDL. The source code tree would not be "distributed only under the terms of this license".
I take a CDDL licensed source code file. I take a GPL licensed source code file. I add inline the GPL licensed code to the CDDL licensed file, and release an executable form of the result. In order to comply with the GPL I then give out a single source code file under the GPL license terms with the code from the two files.
Is this in compliance with the CDDL terms and conditions?
This stackoverflow question have some good points (notably, the accepted answer, and the bit about limitations - the CDDL section 6.2, for example revokes the CDDL in case of patent infringement, something that might be considered an "extra limitation" under the GPL (you're not allowed to add additional limitations to either the GPL or the CDDL). As such, the CDDL might be incompatible with the GPL up to and including v2 - while GPL3 might also be incompatible with the CDDL):
Also, the SO answer mentions consumer protection laws - but AFAIK they generally only apply to consumers - not businesses. So the GPL 0 clause might be void in many jurisdictions for individuals but still valid for businesses.
Oracle can relicense their codebase anytime they want. They _cannot_ be constrained by OpenZFS/Illumos unless they accept patches from them without copyright assignment.
