I’m not concerned about the direction of development, I’m concerned about Oracle holding the (or at least a significant part of) copyright to some software which is used as a Linux module, but which is licensed under a license which is (arguably) incompatible with the GPL.
If Oracle wanted to, they could easily release their copyright under a dual license or something else to clear up the licensing issue. They have not, and have chosen to retain the ability to sue every Linux user using ZFS. This concerns me.
Modules don't have to be under licences compatible with the GPL. There is no universe where you could possibly argue ZFS is a derived work of the kernel. None.
Oracle can't actually sue people using ZFS modules. The CDDL licence that sun provided already gave all the relevant rights away. They can only sue from the GPL side as a kernel contributor, and that's ONLY if someone is dumb enough to ship ZFS code in the linux source tree.
You *seriously* underestimate the number of people using ZoL in production that Oracle would love to sue *if they could.*
It doesn’t really matter on whose “side” the conflict lies; the license is arguably GPL-incompatible, and Linux is not going to change its license. But Oracle could, if they wanted to. And they evidently don’t want to, which is concerning.
It's plainly obvious why they don't. Oracle still sells *their* fork of ZFS.
Back in the pre-oracle days Sun's fishworks division sold ZFS-based storage appliances. Oracle still sells those, and thanks to ZFS' reputation they're still profitable. Oracle simply took that much older fork of ZFS (with no OpenZFS code in it) and made it closed-source.
Before anyone asks, no, that fork is too old and too diverged to be compatible with OpenZFS.
