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by lucian1900 4528 days ago
There is no issue with non-free drivers, since they are explicitly licensed by the copyright owner to be redistributable by anyone and they explicitly installed/enabled by users, so Linux's license is also satisfied.

ZFS could be shipped in a similar manner to drivers, by requiring explicit user action to enable (I believe this is what Gentoo are doing). However, it makes a lot less sense for a filesystem, since the switching costs are much higher than for a graphics driver.

1 comments

It makes exactly the same sense! The installer could require explicit user action to pick ZFS. And there you go, the root filesystem would be on ZFS.
While Linux copyright owners generally allow the (small) breach of GPL that is shipping GPL-incompatible modules (whereas it would be entirely fine if they were installed separately) and the driver copyright owners also explicitly allow redistribution, ZFS's copyright owners have made no such allowance.

It would at least breach ZFS's license to ship it.