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by Sanzig 263 days ago
You are ascribing motives to the OpenZFS project that aren't there. Sun was the one that licensed it CDDL, and OpenZFS is a fork that was created when Oracle bought Sun and decided to close source ZFS. Oracle has zero involvement with OpenZFS.

Since the pre-fork code is from Sun, Oracle owns the copyright, and they won't re-license it.

The idea that the OpenZFS team wants CDDL out of spite for Linux is an absurd conspiracy theory. Their hands are tied - I'm sure they'd move to a compatible license if they could, but they can't.

1 comments

CDDL ensures OpenZFS can be used for not just Linux, and prevents patent-based attacks (which have been used against GPLv2 code reuse in the past).

So the OpenZFS team is not exactly interested in moving to GPLv2, because it would break multiple platforms.

I doubt the OpenZFS team would move to GPLv2 if they were able to relicense to anything they wanted. Given their close association with FreeBSD, BSD-2 or a similar permissive license wouldn't shock me.

But it's an academic exercise anyway, since it seems Oracle has no intention of allowing them to relicense.