by AndrewDavis | 2025-09-30 22:34:34+00:00
Hi,there's a lot to unpack here.

> They could always move to a compatible license? > No, it was always designed to be hostile to Linux from the outset. It's a project that doesn't want to interoperability with Linux

I'm not sure why you've jumped here. I didn't mention a specific project or licence.

But, nonetheless I'm going to assume you mean OpenZFS.

1. No they can't change the license. Much like Linux contributors retain their own copyright, OpenZFS can't just change the license. The only group that could hypothetically change it is Oracle given the clause the steward of the license can release a new version, but that's unlikely and Oracle has absolute nothing to do with the existing project.

2. Staying on the license and compatibility. It's really quite confusing on what's compatible in the eyes of Linux. The very fact they have separate export and export GPL symbols suggest Linux as a project sanctions non GPL modules, and considers them compatible if they only use those symbols, perhaps in the same vein as they consider the syscall boundary to be the compatible with non GPL? If someone who is actually in the know about why there are two sets of exports if love to be know.

3. Always designed to be hostile to Linux. Whether that's true or not is the debateable, there are conflicting opinions from those who worked at Sun at the time. Also the comment criticises a community that had no hand in whether or not it was intended to be hostile to Linux or not. In the end is copyleft software, very similar in spirit to the Mozilla public license. And by definition copyleft licenses are inherently incompatible without specific get out of the jail clauses to combine them (see MPLv2 for example).

4. Re interoperability. Strongly disagree. OpenZFS takes great strides to be compatible with Linux. Each release a developer sends hours pouring over Linux changes and updating a compat layer, and the module remains compatible to compile against multiple Linux versions at any one time, there are even compat patches to detect distro specific backports that while the version hasn't changed the distro have back ported things that change behaviour. That's a serious commitment to interoperability. And a large number of openzfs devs do their work against Linux as their primary platform, hence why the FreeBSD rebased their ZFS upstream on ZFS on Linux, leading it to become the official upstream OpenZFS. I can't see how anyone could say in good faith they don't care about Linux compatibility unless they haven't looked over at the openzfs project for over a decade.

4. Re why do I think Linux folks should maintain APIs for them.

The way you worded this strongly implies I was saying Linux should maintain an API for them. In no way did I say that. I was replying to a post that was adament that Linux doesn't remove things. I provided a perspective that Linux does in fact remove things. I wasn't arguing for maintaining any API, Linux doesn't even guarantee internal APIs for themselves. I was pointing out changing a symbol export from export to everyone to export GPL only isn't changing it, given it's the exact same API they've just simply removed it for some groups.

None the less I think it'd be great if Linux could maintain some APIs for out of tree modules. But they don't and that's fine. I just find changing exports from open for everyone tomorrow GPL only to be rather hostile.

Really, no one in either of these communities had any say in their license (sans Torvalds). Both creating great stuff for we as users to run. And it'd be great if people working on free software could get along, and those in the peanut gallery didn't prescribe malcontent between them because of a difference in license they didn't pick.