From: geoff@clare.See-My-Signature.invalid   
      
   Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:   
      
   > On Mon, 22 Dec 2025 13:38:24 +0000, Geoff Clare wrote:   
   >   
   >> Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:   
   >>   
   >>> Fun fact: even Oracle will not offer ZFS on its own Linux distro,   
   >>> but it will give you btrfs instead.   
   >>   
   >> No doubt because of the licensing issue that is the reason ZFS has   
   >> to be installed via dkms on Linux instead of being native.   
   >   
   > Guess who controls the licensing of ZFS?   
      
   Indeed, although the situation is more complicated than that simple   
   phrasing implies.   
      
   When Sun open-sourced Solaris (including the original ZFS) they created   
   their own licence for it, and the reason ZFS can't be included in the   
   Linux kernel is that Sun's licence is incompatible with the GPLv2   
   licence used for Linux.   
      
   When Oracle bought Sun they took Solaris back to being closed source   
   and the community forked the OpenSolaris code as Illumos and the ZFS   
   code as OpenZFS.  Since ownership of the original code transferred   
   to Oracle, only they could change it to a different licence (e.g. one   
   compatible with GPLv2), which I suppose could be considered a form of   
   control over the OpenZFS licensing, but equally they can't prevent   
   OpenZFS (or Illumos) from being developed and distributed under the   
   original Sun licence.   
      
   At least, that's how I understand the current situation (IANAL).   
      
   --   
   Geoff Clare    
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)