[gillianseed]

The CDDL was crafted with GPL existing and was according to the person responsible for creating it, deliberately made incompatible with GPLv2. Of course not hard to understand given that Sun had no reason whatsoever to hand over their prized technology (ZFS, DTrace) to the competitor which was killing them in the market.

>On the other hand, I suspect RMS isn't too happy with this turn of events.

Why not ?

>The sfconservancy may be the more likely party to bring a lawsuit.

That would require that a Linux copyright holder would want to sue, why would they ? OpenZFS is open source, and previous suits has been about source code compliance.

[ryao]

It is probably more accurate to claim the GPL was designed to be incompatible with an entire class of licenses that includes the CDDL, and the MPL on which it was based and any future licenses similar to or based on licenses in that class (of which the CDDL was given that it was made after the GPL).

There is no clause in the CDDL that places restrictions on other files in a combined work, but there is one the GPL. There are people out there who dislike the GPL for that, there are some people who explicitly go out of their way to avoid GPL compatibility because of that and I am sure that some of those people existed at Sun, but I really doubt that the design of a license by a huge organization with many people giving input can be simplified to one guy thinking GPL incompatibility is a good feature.

I also think this happened years ago and there really is no point to living in the past. People cannot distribute a vmlinux file with ZFS linked into it (i.e. not a kernel module, but part of the binary itself) because of that, but that does not stop people from distributing it as a kernel module and that is how filesystem code is loaded these days, so it is a non-issue.

[gillianseed]

>It is probably more accurate to claim the GPL was designed to be incompatible with an entire class of licenses that includes the CDDL,

It was designed to give and preserve rights for end users, it's not really a big mystery, and the actual rights which are given and preserved perfectly mirror that.

I don't see anything that would substantiate your claim of them being 'deliberately' incompatible with any other licenses (anything you can point to ?), in fact they've fixed incompability problems in GPLv3 with other licenses.

And of course both MPL and CDDL came along much later than GPLv2, with which they were incompatible (MPL 2.0 in turn rectified this).

>can be simplified to one guy thinking GPL incompatibility is a good feature.

No, I don't think for a second that it was 'one guy', again Sun management had absolutely zero reason to allow Linux to incorporate ZFS and DTrace and every business reason not to, in fact from a business standpoint it would have been crazy to hand over ZFS and DTrace to their main competitor.

>but that does not stop people from distributing it as a kernel module and that is how filesystem code is loaded these days, so it is a non-issue.

I'm not at all sure it's a non-issue, this is a Linux kernel module running in Linux kernel space, I'm pretty sure there is a strong case for this being considered a derivative, that said I hope it won't be an issue since having ZFS in a native capacity with minimal effort is a boon for Linux.

[ryao]

Do you have a bar number? If not, you being "pretty sure" does not mean much.

[ajsalminen]

> It is probably more accurate to claim the GPL was designed to be incompatible with an entire class of licenses that includes the CDDL, and the MPL on which it was based and any future licenses similar to or based on licenses in that class (of which the CDDL was given that it was made after the GPL).

Given that work was done to make GPLv3 more compatible with other open source licenses and that GPLv2 predates both of the licenses you mention by quite a bit I'm inclined to think that's nonsense.

[ryao]

If being compatible with anything were the goal, the FSF would have opted for the CC0 license. Since the GPL is not compatible with things on that level, it is designed to be incompatible with certain things. Some subset of possible open source licenses definitely were excluded as part of that.