On Monday, June 29, 2020 9:26:09 AM MST Matthew Miller wrote:
On Sun, Jun 28, 2020 at 09:59:52AM -0700, John M. Harris Jr wrote:
> > We cannot include ZFS in Fedora for legal reasons. Additionally, ZFS is
> > not really intended for the laptop use case.
>
> Has that actually been explored? How does Canonical get around the legal
> issues with OpenZFS' licensing?
I can't really speculate on Canonical's legal stance and I encourage
everyone else to also not.
I can point to Red Hat's, though: the knowledge base article here
https://access.redhat.com/solutions/79633 says:
* ZFS is not included in the upstream Linux kernel due to licensing
reasons.
* Red Hat applies the upstream first policy for kernel modules
(including
filesystems). Without upstream presence, kernel modules like ZFS cannot
be supported by Red Hat.
and "due to licensing reasons" links to
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2016/feb/25/zfs-and-linux/ which is quite
interesting and quite long. If you have just time to read one section, the
two paragraphs at the end under "Do Not Rely On This Document As Legal
Advice" seem like the _most_ interesting to me.
I've both read that page, and linked to it further down in this thread. Yes, I
believe that Canonical's implementation is a GPL violation, but it doesn't
need to be. So long as the source is in a separate package, and it's packaged
as a kmod, it wouldn't be a GPL violation. It's worth considering, in my
opinion, whether or not it'd be available for RHEL. It wouldn't be the first
package RHEL doesn't have, but Fedora does. :)
--
John M. Harris, Jr.