Comment by Wowfunhappy
6 years ago
Sorry for using the term "zealots", I didn't intend it as a pejorative. I should probably have said "hardliners". I meant only to refer to people at the extreme end of the spectrum on this issue.
> The root of the question is "What determines a change to the software". [...] The answers to these questions are not well defined.
And that's fair, but what confuses me is that I never see this question raised on non-Linux platforms. No one considers Windows drivers a derivative of Windows, or Mac kernel extensions a derivative of Darwin.
Should the currently-in-development Windows ZFS port reach maturity and gain widespread adoption (which feels possible!), do you foresee a possibility of Oracle suing? If not, why is Linux different?
>No one considers Windows drivers a derivative of Windows, or Mac kernel extensions a derivative of Darwin.
Perhaps they do, but the difference is that their licensing does not regard their status of derivative works as being important. Those platforms have their own restrictions on what drivers they want to allow. In particular, Mac doesn't even allow unsigned drivers anymore, and any signed drivers have to go through a manual approval process. And don't forget iOS, which doesn't even support user-loadable drivers at all.
>Should the currently-in-development Windows ZFS port reach maturity and gain widespread adoption (which feels possible!), do you foresee a possibility of Oracle suing? If not, why is Linux different?
I'm not sure, I haven't used Windows in many years and I don't know their policies. But see what I said earlier: the simple answer is that the license is different from the license of Linux. For more details, the question you should be asking is: Is the CDDL incompatible with Windows licensing?
Thank you!
Just to clarify one little thing, because it appears to be something of a common misconception:
> Mac doesn't even allow unsigned drivers anymore
You can absolutely still install unsigned drivers (kernel extensions) on macOS, the user just needs to run a Terminal command from recovery mode. This is a one-time process that takes all of five minutes if you know what you're doing.
You can theoretically replace the Darwin kernel with your own version too. macOS is not iOS, you can completely open it up if you want.