by Florian Idelberger
The topic of license incompatibility, either between different free and open-source licenses or free and open-source licenses and proprietary licenses, especially in the context of Linux kernel modules has been a recurring topic, (not only) on ifross.org. This was for example a topic for this ifross news about NVIDIA’s practices in making kernel modules with binary blobs work with the kernel, while trying not to fall under the copyleft clause of the GPL. These discussions continued, also among user as can be seen for example from the NVIDIA developer forums and in other cases.
Recently, there is more discussion again prompted by built-in support for ZFS for Linux (http://zfsonlinux.org) in Ubuntu’s next release 16.04 LTS (as already present in testing versions) and the question whether this infringes upon usage and distribution rights of the Linux Kernel as published under the GPL v2 or those portions of ZFS for Linux originally written for Solaris and published under the CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License) as originally released by Sun Microsystems, now with copyright held by Oracle. » Weiter