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by techdragon 4196 days ago
as others have said below. the CDDL or 'cuddle' license as some chose to pronounce it. Is incompatible with the GPL, which means two things.

1 - We can't just take the code and add it to the kernel. 2 - The patent and other legal grants in the licence won't apply if we try to reverse engineer a compatible GPL2 equivalent for the kernel to use, which will be a HUGE risk for the few companies that would probably consider the cost of reverse engineering worth it. And before you say it can be done without company support. I have 2 things to say, hows that going for the ReiserFS 4 fans who wanted to keep improving that, and in order to continue the work on ZFS effectively, the existing ZFS developers have 'ganged up' and now try to work on everything so that the openzfs project can be a single source of truth for the ZFS source code, and a reverse engineered version would be very unlikely to benefit from this, and would therefore require even more developer time just keeping up with the improvements 'upstream' in ZFS from the 'original' ZFS codebase.
1 comments
23david 4190 days ago 

  In the case of the kernel, this prevents us from distributing ZFS as part of 
  the kernel binary. However, there is nothing in either license that prevents 
  distributing it in the form of a binary module or in the form of source code.
Source: http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html#WhatAboutTheLicensingIssue

  ZFS cannot be added to Linux directly because the CDDL is incompatible with the GPL. 
  ZFS can, however, be distributed as a DKMS package separate from the main kernel package.
Source: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZFS

So why not just distribute the DKMS package with a distro? Easy enough. Will it ruin the user experience somehow?

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