Re: ZFS in Buster
On Wed, May 29, 2019 at 8:55 PM Ian Jackson
<ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
>
> Ansgar writes ("Re: ZFS in Buster"):
> > Ian Jackson writes:
> > > I think this would be both unwise legally (without seeking additional
> > > legal advice) and rather rude to the kernel upstream whose code is
> > > then being reused without permission - indeed, contrary to their
> > > explicitly stated intent.
> >
> > At least one commercial distribution (Ubuntu) has been distributing ZFS
> > binary modules as part of their Linux packages for some years and didn't
> > have any problems.
>
> That doesn't prove anything other than that no-one felt it was
> politically or financially expedient to sue.
>
> AIUI Debian's position is still that summarised here:
> https://blog.halon.org.uk/2016/01/on-zfs-in-debian/
> (sorry about the pale grey on white disease; it works well in w3m)
>
> Are you trying to reopen that discussion ? If so then you should be
> CCing ftpmaster@ and leader@ probably...
>
(With my Debian ZoL hat on.)
I don't know whether this is correct time to discuss about Debian's
position but it was a compromise. Having Mehdi Dogguy (DPL of the
time) and representatives of Software Freedom Conservancy on the
table, we talked about this very topic at DebConf 16 and agreed to put
ZFS into contrib for the good of our users.
ZFS is free and open source software, perfectly complies with DFSG for
main archive inclusion on its own, and we had another copy of the code
in FreeBSD kernel which is main. While putting it into contrib is a
very expressive language telling the world that Debian and, more
importantly SFC, would like to see that the licensing issue could have
a better resolution at the root. And this is exactly the compromise
that made ZFS possible to go through NEW.
Regards,
Aron
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