On 17 Mar 2016 06:10, "Gordon Messmer" <gordon.messmer@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 03/16/2016 05:25 PM, Rick Stevens wrote:
>>
>>
>> Keep in mind that SuSE is not based in the United States and can, if
>> they so choose, thumb their noses at US patent and copyright law.
>
>
> SuSE, AFAIK, isn't planning to distribute ZFS.  That's Canonical. They're also not based in the US, but they'd probably still be prohibited from commercially distributing any infringing products in the US.  So, for example, the Dell developer systems may need a ZFS-free build.
>

Canonical do have a registered US presence in Canonical Inc though, however how much they keep in it I don't know.

Back to the Fedora point Debian and the SFC do agree that a source based distribution, with no redistribution of the resultant compiled binary, would comply with both licences so a DKMS approach is at least valid.

However there was only recently a discussion about using DKMS stuff in Fedora and the kernel maintainers were very clear that kernel modules external to the main kernel build are outside of Fedora guidelines for a variety of reasons.

So short of a legal challenge to Canonical's plans resulting in a ruling that it is indeed fine to distribute the combined works of the kernel and a CDDL module in compiled form this allowing ZFS to go upstream under CDDL, or Oracle flexing their legal muscles and enacting clause 4.1(?) of CDDL 1.0 to relicense the code to something GPL compatible (and NetApp then not leveraging their WAFL patents), ZFS is not going to be in Fedora or RHEL for the foreseeable future.