The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) thinks Canonical, the curator of Ubuntu, has breached the Gnu Public Licence (GPL).
As the Conservancy explains, Canonical recently announced that Ubuntu 16.04 will “make OpenZFS available on every Ubuntu system. Canonical reckons that adding OpenZFS represents “one of the most exciting new features Linux has seen in a very long time.”
A couple of days after announcing that it would add OpenZFS to Ubuntu, Canonicals’ Dustin Kirkland returned to the subject in a post titled ZFS Licensing and Linux in which he explained that “We at Canonical have conducted a legal review, including discussion with the industry’s leading software freedom legal counsel, of the licenses that apply to the Linux kernel and to ZFS.”
“And in doing so, we have concluded that we are acting within the rights granted and in compliance with their terms of both of those licenses.”
The SFC disagrees, because ZFS saw the light of day when Sun released OpenSolaris under the Common Development and Distribution License, version 1 (CDDLv1). The Conservancy says “unfortunately, CDDLv1 is incompatible with GPLv2, so distribution of binaries is not permitted.”
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/26/canonical_in_zfsonlinux_gpl_violation_spat/
Submitted by: Arnfried Walbrecht
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