Comment by thenewnewguy
6 years ago
There is an "approved" method - write an publish your own kernel module. However if your module is not GPL licensed it cannot be published in the linux kernel itself, and you must keep up with the maintenance of the code. This is a relatively fair requirement imo.
...which is what the ZFS on Linux team are doing?
The issue here is which parts of the kernel API are allowed for non-GPL modules has been decided to be a moving target from version to version, which might as well be interpreted as "just don't bother anymore".
I wonder if this was exactly what they intended, i.e.: "just don't bother anymore to write out of tree driver and put them under GBL into the tree". And ZFS might just have been accidentally hit by this but is in a situation where it can't put thinks into the tree...