Does it change any of the other information? I admit I shouldn't have written "both require the entire derived work to be distributed under CDDL/GPL", and instead should have written "both may require, depending on a court's interpretation, the zfs kernel module to be distributed under CDDL or GPL respectively".
I think the rest of the comment stands though, right?
> "both may require, depending on a court's interpretation, the zfs kernel module to be distributed under CDDL or GPL respectively".
That's wrong, and misses fundamental information about the CDDL.
First, the CDDL gives absolutely no fucks how you licence a resulting binary. It only cares about the specific covered source files, and doesn't care what you bundle them with. So nobody would ever argue that the module should be licenced as CDDL.
On the flip side, you'd have a really hard time arguing that the module should be licensed as GPL.* Sure, there's maybe a GPL wrapper, but lots of modules are non-GPL even when they might feature such a wrapper. ie. nvidia. You also can't argue ZFS is a derived work of the kernel, which is really the crux of the issue. ZFS was first written on solaris, developed for several years on freeBSD, and remains neutral across 3-5 different supported OSs. There's nothing to indicate the GPL should have more claim over ZFS than the wrapper.
The one and only place you'll ever run into trouble is if you start trying to distribute ZFS *source code* in the kernel source tree, as a fully integrated part of the kernel. (EDIT: or compiled together in a single kernel binary, from said combined source) The CDDL doesn't care about the mixing but the GPL does. Literally everyone agrees this is a bad idea and nobody does it.
*Let's ignore for a moment for the moment that you *couldn't* since the GPL requires complete corresponding source code and you can't relicence the CDDL source code files.
I agree that statement is factually incorrect, but I still don't think it changes the overall information in my comment in any meaningful way. The actual risk is low, the risk if of GPL infringement, not of oracle suing you, and there are people who contest it on either side. Those are the key points, and those are true I believe.
> On the flip side, you'd have a really hard time arguing that the module should be licensed as GPL
That is the very thing that some people do argue, for example the sfconservancy people. As I note, canonical's lawyers take your view (and I personally agree), but it's not clearcut. The sfconservancy outline their reasoning clearly for why they think zfs.ko is a derived work of the linux kernel.
The SFC can get stuffed. Their argument says nothing in particular about ZFS and is essentially "the kernel is GPL and therefore ALL modules MUST BE GPL.
Their stance isn't just rejected by nvidia and company, but also by the kernel devs most notably torvalds himself. Their argument boils down to "if ONLY it were statically linked everyone would say it's derived" combined with "there's no difference between static and dynamic linking."
They completely ignore the inconvenient fact that being statically linked would imply being pasted into the kernel tree, and the real reason people would say it's derived at that point is because you'd expect the ZFS code to be deeply connected with linux's guts if that were the case. Which it isn't, and it isn't. Over in reality courts look at how code came to be and where it came from, a more reasonable definition of "derived." For one thing it means I can't come up with a GPL module that statically links against a pre-existing bit of other software and then try to claim the software should be GPL. (remember, OpenZFS' fork long predates ZFS' compatibility with linux)
Being a derived work shouldn't imply time travel, i.e. at the very minimum shouldn't violate causality.
Torvalds himself has personally refuted the "(dynamic) linking inescapably means you're derived" point on multiple occasions, and yet here the SFC is, continuing to wave it around because that's how they wish it worked.
Their article is very plainly a "extend the GPL's reach" political move attempting to move the goalposts the kernel community set up wrt proprietary modules, while using the muddy waters around ZFS as cover. Their arguments could equally be applied to the nvidia kernel module and yet would instantly be rejected as extreeme if they attempted to use nvidia's module as their subject.
Does it change any of the other information? I admit I shouldn't have written "both require the entire derived work to be distributed under CDDL/GPL", and instead should have written "both may require, depending on a court's interpretation, the zfs kernel module to be distributed under CDDL or GPL respectively".
I think the rest of the comment stands though, right?