I don't know if they do care about these things, but it is conceivable they might care about: Selling support, increasing the amount of engineers familiar with their stuff, finding some new angle to try to sue Linux out of existence with or any one other goal that is furthered by the network effect.
Oracle can't change the license alone. While Oracle is the majority copyright holder, some parts are copyrighted by other people and/or organisations. In fact, this was one of the building principles of the CDDL license.
This ZFS on Linux project mentioned in the article doesn't use the current Oracle ZFS code (which is proprietary), but rather the OpenZFS code which has had very significant changes that happened post-Oracle fork by parties other than Oracle.
> Oracle could release a new version of CDDL that explicitly made the ZoL project GPL compatible.
By allowing ZFS-derived works to be licensed under GPL, I suppose. I wonder if they could do it without allowing for a GPL fork which would become unmergable to the upstream?
The problem would be similar to MIT or Apache licensing a project. It is very uncommon for someone to create a fork of an existing project _just_ to change the license. Most of the people working on OpenZFS are unlikely to just switch licenses, the net result would just be to allow dual-licensing under GPLv2 so you can use it in Linux.
CDDL requires you to opt out of later versions. 9 files (out of 219) totaling 950 lines (out of over 190,000) in the ZoL kernel code claim to be 1.0 only. What definition of "Almost all" are you using?
I'm not sure you understand the situation, which is surprising with how much time you spend talking about it - is this willful? - Oracle (And Sun before them) do not hold all of the copyrights involved. Some of them are held by third parties.
The CDDL was written to be as permissive as possible within the boundaries they are held to by these third parties.
It is impossible for Oracle to release a version of the license that is GPL compatible without completely removing all of these third party components they do not hold the copyright to.
I would recommend reading section 4 of the CDDL (it's actually very similar to section 6 of the MPL 1.1 because that's what it was based on).
In particular, it has an or-any-later version clause that is opt-out. This means that if Oracle decided to release CDDL 2.0 tomorrow that was GPL-compatible, anyone with CDDL 1.0 licensed (without the opt-out) codebases could then use it in conjunction with GPL code (by exercising the upgrade path). From memory, the original ZFS codebase (and also OpenZFS) doesn't exercise the opt-out -- which means that they can be switched this way. [This is basically how you would take LGPLv2 code and put it into an AGPLv3 codebase (LGPLv2 -> GPLv2+ -> GPLv3+ -> AGPLv3+).]
I believe that's what they were trying to say. I'm not a lawyer (as usual) but that was the opinion of the community a few years ago. Canonical decided to just "go for it" and see whether Oracle will sue them. We'll see what happens in the future.
> It is impossible for Oracle to release a version of the license that is GPL compatible without completely removing all of these third party components they do not hold the copyright to.
I don't think this can be accurate. Ownership of ZFS-related code is not tied to being the license steward - Oracle could theoretically pass off license steward duties to a third party without passing ZFS copyrights or obligations to the same third party. That third party could then change the terms of the CDDL without having any obligations towards those third parties.
In any case, it doesn't make sense - the CDDL is more permissive than GPL 2.0 other than its patent clause, and (as far as this discussion is concerned) the only relevant party covered by 6.2 is Oracle.
there is a lot of self-confidence in your reply, but it doesn't address his/her point: that there is essentially a "loophole" that Oracle could exploit if they wanted to by writing a new version of the CDDL.
his/her contention is that most of the code has been released without the explicit opt-out for a more recent version of CDDL.
there's no need to get nasty; just bring the facts.