FSF Issues Fresh Statement Over ZFS On Linux With GPL Enforcement

Written by Michael Larabel in GNU on 11 April 2016 at 04:17 PM EDT. 110 Comments
GNU
The Free Software Foundation has issued a fresh statement today concerning the recent ZFS file-system efforts on Linux, driven in large part by Canonical's plans for shipping ZFS support in Ubuntu 16.04.

While Ubuntu continues moving forward with ZFS plans for the 16.04 LTS release, the Software Freedom Conservancy has said combining ZFS with Linux is a GPL violation as long as ZFS continues to be CDDL licensed by Oracle.

The Free Software Foundation's article today is entitled Interpreting, enforcing and changing the GNU GPL, as applied to combining Linux and ZFS and attributed to Richard Stallman. It comes down to a largely vague article about GPL enforcement for Linux.

The main motivation appears to be to get Oracle to try to release ZFS under the GPL or a GPL compatible license. RMS wrote, "the copyright holders of ZFS (the version that is actually used) can give permission to use it under the GNU GPL, version 2 or later, in addition to any other license. This would make it possible to combine that version with Linux without violating the license of Linux. This would be the ideal resolution and we urge the copyright holders of ZFS to do so."

There is also this associated FSF news item about the article with a few quotes by FSF's executive director, John Sullivan, and FSF's licensing and compliance manager, Joshua Gay.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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