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He's not the only person that feels CDDL and GPL licenses are compatible. Their alleged incompatibility[1] seems to stem from a lot of hair splitting over technicalities that don't align with the spirit of either license. [2][3][4]

It's particularly funny that the community (except Canonical and a handful of individuals) largely settled on the CDDL-GPL issue--deciding they were incompatible and giving up on the possibility of upstreaming ZFS--but is still so highly split on the question of RHEL's GPL compatibility w.r.t. calling source code sharing a violation of their customer agreement.

The RHEL issue stems from the GPL literally saying,

> You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.

Conspicuously, you may not impose restrictions on the EXERCISE of these rights, not just further restrictions to the rights themselves. There's a pretty clear argument to be made that RHEL's actions in ending business relationships with any customers would be a restriction stemming from their having exercised their right. There's basically no hair splitting here. This should be done and dusted in the collective open source community conscious.

But the CDDL-GPL issue? There is no smoking gun in either license. The arguments against are much more strenuous.

But the community settled one debate much more decisively than the other.

If ZFS was as desirable to the Linux community as a fully open RHEL, I think there would've be much more enthusiasm in interpreting legal theory around it.

I think the community ought to be coming down much harder around the theory of RHEL incompatibility. It's really not a stretch from the most straightforward reading of the license.

It's also pretty conspicuous that Oracle has done precisely nothing to stop OpenZFS's inertia. If they felt it was incompatible and were going to act, they had their chance.

[1] https://www.fsf.org/licensing/zfs-and-linux

[2] https://blog.hansenpartnership.com/are-gplv2-and-cddl-incomp...

[3] https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/2106

[4] https://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2016/linux-kernel-cddl...