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Getting grubby with ZFS

Getting grubby with ZFS

Posted Dec 8, 2010 9:53 UTC (Wed) by mjthayer (guest, #39183)
In reply to: Getting grubby with ZFS by ccurtis
Parent article: Getting grubby with ZFS

> If the FSF releases a GPLv4 that says "if you modify and redistribute this software, you agree to also distribute all source to all software written by you" and if you then take GPLv2+ software and redistribute it under these new terms, only you (and those who get the software from you) should be held to the new terms - not the original author.

More specifically, shouldn't a clearer distinction be made between the terms under which Oracle distributes the software (it obviously has to choose one of the available licences, I presume it is not legally possible for it to use several versions of the licence in one act of distribution) and the options they give the person they distribute the software too for further distribution? I assume they are distributing under GPLv2, but nothing stops them letting the people who get it from them redistributing under GPLv3 without it affecting Oracle in any way.

Similarly there have been complaints regarding VirtualBox that Oracle should be bound to the terms of the GPL and publish the sources to the closed source parts because they distribute it. However, my understanding is that Oracle doesn't distribute it under those terms (they own the copyrights and can do more or less what they want), but they do allow people who receive it to redistribute it under the GPL, minus the non-closed parts.


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Getting grubby with ZFS

Posted Dec 9, 2010 4:29 UTC (Thu) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]

Well, one difference is that the ZFS-patched version of grub-legacy is derived from the FSF code, so distributing it would require that they conform to the license of the upstream project.

So when they distributed their modified version of grub-legacy it must have been under at least one of GPLv2 and GPLv3. Both of these have some form of patent licensing language, so Oracle must have satisfied at least one of those clauses.


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