[protomyth]

The basic misunderstanding is that Oracle does not own the the copyright to all of OpenZFS. A lot of code in the OpenZFS code base is not under any sort of copyright assignment to Oracle. To change the license on the whole, you would need Oracle and all the contributors who have not done copyright assignments to agree to re-license their code.

[cyphar]

I'm going to repeat this again. It's got nothing to do with copyright assignment. The license that the code is under (CDDL), by default, allows Oracle to provide newer versions that anyone can update their copy of the code to.

It's effectively the same mechanism as MPL's update system, and also effectively the same as GPL's update mechanism. You can take a GPLv2-or-later codebase and redistribute it as GPLv3-or-later because the FSF has released GPLv3. Similarly, you can take a CDDL-1.0 codebase and redistribute it as CDDL-2.0 because the "or any later version" clause is implicit and opt-out.

If you agree that GPLv2-or-later code (regardless of who owns the copyright) can be redistributed or combined with GPLv3-or-later code, then you agree with the basic point of what I'm saying. Obviously the specifics are different but the basic idea is the same.

Seriously. Read section 4 of the CDDL[1]. It's only three short paragraphs.

[1]: https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/blob/master/OPENSOLARIS.LI...

[protomyth]

I have read it, but not all of the files are under the "later" clause. Its a small number right now, but it will probably increase. So Oracle cannot do the whole OpenZFS in one swoop.

[cyphar]

The majority of OpenZFS hasn't exercised the opt-out (and most importantly, the portions that are from the original ZFS are definitely not exercising the opt-out). There are two possible options:

1. Re-implement those files. 2. Ask the current copyright holder to remove the opt-out.

Given how small the number of lines is[1], I would be surprised if re-implementing would take more than a few weeks.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14866179

[mjg59]

They agreed to that when they released the code under CDDL without specifying that it was restricted to version 1.0. Look at how Wikipedia was relicensed from GFDL to CC-BY-SA for an example of this.

[gribbly]

>Oracle does not own the the copyright to all of OpenZFS

True, but I don't think the OpenZFS developers would be against relicensing their code to be GPL compatible,they are offering a Linux version of OpenZFS after all, so if Oracle would re/dual license their part of the code in a GPL compatible manner I'm sure the OpenZFS devs would do the same.

[protomyth]

I would imagine the FreeBSD groups might object because it gives their project an edge over Linux. I can see if it went to a BSD license, but let's be real this is friggin Oracle. They won't do it because there is no actual advantage for them. Grateful developers are about their lowest priority. Maybe if it helped them win a contract that paid a lot of money they'd do it.

[4ad]

> I would imagine the FreeBSD groups might object because it gives their project an edge over Linux.

Or, they might object because this hypothetical new license is incompatible with FreeBSD for various reasons, legal or otherwise, and they would not be able to get new contributions back into FreeBSD.