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by drewg123 1182 days ago
..."you are forming a derivative work of the Kernel"

Which in the case of ZFS is obviously nonsense. ZFS was developed on Solaris and ported to many other OSes. Its certainly not a derivative work of the linux kernel. This is a case of the linux kernel devs being bullies, and trying to make life harder for 3rd party modules.

If they can claim copyright violation for using a GPL-only symbol which didn't used to be GPL-only, then I think ZFS devs can claim an antitrust violation for locking them out of the kernel. Both legal concepts are absurd..
1 comments
denotational 1182 days ago
> This is a case of the linux kernel devs being bullies, and trying to make life harder for 3rd party modules.

I’m inclined to agree, but the fact that ZFS was developed on Solaris and ported to Linux is irrelevant in my opinion: the specific Kernel module using the GPL symbols would be the derivative work, not ZFS as a concept.

Your point about symbols being retroactively made GPL-only is very interesting, and I think it really undermines the Kernel developers’ position.

Again, I don’t really buy Linus’s argument at all, but I think it’s relevant to the discussion, which is why I mentioned it.

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mustache_kimono 1182 days ago
> the specific Kernel module using the GPL symbols would be the derivative work, not ZFS as a concept.

Why, as compared to a kernel module linked to non-GPL-only symbols?

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