Comment by dathinab
6 years ago
> he can't afford to care about that - keeping the linux kernel codebase sane while adding new features, supported hardware, optimizations, and fixes at an honestly scary rate, is not that easy.
Maybe, but the complains seem to be more related to the (problematic) changes not being of technical nature accidentally braking ZFS, but being more of political nature. With speculation that it might have been meant to _intentionally_ brake ZFS and then pretend this was a accident because ZFS isn't (and can never) be maintained in tree. Basically on the line of "we don't like out of tree kernel modules so we make the live hard for them". No idea if this is actually the case or people just spin thinks together. Even if it is the case I'm not sure what I should think about, because it's at least partially somewhat understandably.
Linus is rather tolerant (or apathetic) about non-GPL modules, but what he doesn't care to do is ensure that there is an appropriate set of non-GPL-marked exports available for external modules. If some other developer happens to mark some export GPL and it happens to be one key export needed by a non-GPL external module, Linus doesn't care, because he doesn't care about external modules.
This has come up many times in the past. Keep in mind that linux has always been GPLv2-only, it is not LGPL or anything like that.
https://lwn.net/Articles/769471/
https://lwn.net/Articles/603131/
https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/2/7/451