There's been some Friday night kernel drama on the Linux kernel mailing list... Linus Torvalds has expressed regrets for merging the Bcachefs file-system and an ensuing back-and-forth between the file-system maintainer.

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[+] -6 points 2 years ago (14 children)

How do you define GPL compatible?

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago* (7 children)

    Do your own research, that's a pretty well-discussed topic, particularly as concerns ZFS.

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  • [+] -8 points 2 years ago* (6 children)

    I'm all over ZFS and I am not aware of any unresolved "licence issues". It's like a decade old at this point

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    License incompatibility is one big reason OpenZFS is not in-tree for Linux, there is plenty of public discussion about this online.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago (2 children)
  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    Yes, but note that neither the Linux foundation nor OpenZFS are going to put themselves in legal risk on the word of a stack exchange comment, no matter who it's from. Even if their legal teams all have no issue, Oracle has a reputation for being litigious and the fact that they haven't resolved the issue once and for all despite the fact they could suggest they're keeping the possibility of litigation in their back pocket (regardless of if such a case would have merit).

    Canonical has said they don't think there is an issue and put their money where their mouth was, but they are one of very few to do so.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    Not under a license which prohibits also licensing under the GPL. i.e. it has no conditions beyond what the GPL specifies.

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  • [–] -3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (4 children)

    Not true

    The only condition is that CCDL and GPL don't apply to the same file. Wifi works just fine and the source code isn't GPL yet wifi drivers are in the kernel..

    https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2094/are-cddl-and-gpl-really-incompatible

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    ...because they are incompatible licenses.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (2 children)

    There's no requirement for them to apply to the same file? There's already blobs in the kernel the gpl doesn't apply to the source of

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    The question was "How do you define GPL compatible?". The answer to that question has nothing to do with code being split between files. Two licenses are incompatible if they can't both apply at the same time to the same thing.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    The two works can live harmoniously together in the same repo, therefore, not incompatible by one definition and the one that matters.

    There's already big organisations doing it and they haven't had any issues

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