Seriously, I don't understand what you're arguing here.
I'll try to be a little clearer, but it's basically what I started with and ended with (which you actually appear to agree with)
1.) SFC says 'in this context, Oracle could make everyone's life easier by waving their magic relicensing wand'
2.) I say 'That's not much of an argument.'
3.) I say 'lists 73 authors not including the Oracle developers, which appear to be both individuals (gmail accounts, etc) and multiple individual businesses (nexenta, ovh, etc)'
4.) I say 'It really seems like neither could easily relicense, so there is no magic wand.'
In other words, there is no 'magic wand' because even if Oracle magically did there thing it would not fix the issue that FSC has with Canonical because the actual 'ZFS on Linux' code would still be licensed as CDDL. So it's 'not much of an argument' because it would be hard (if even possible) to get every ZoL contributor to relicense, and thus doesn't solve the problem.
To argue that this is somehow of equivalent complexity
You seem to be getting stuck on some issue of relicensing being equivalent. From a mathematical point of view, I'm sure you could assign some probability to both events (with Linux relicensing having a smaller chance), but it seems like for all intents and purposes, it's zero (even if Oracle relicensed). Do two events have to have equivalent complexity in order to be basically irrelevant as FSC argument? Seems to me like it's just FSC finger-pointing as rhetorical trick (and thus my pointing out it's lack of merit)
VLC re-licensed their project and they had 300 authors.
When people talked about the feasibility of re-license linux to gplv3 (as a thought experiment), people talked about several thousands of authors under the time period of almost 30 years. Several of them are dead.
But the discussion here also lack a significant detail; the target license for which ZFS would switch to. Commenters here on HN has said (unsourced) that the original developers has expressed an opinion that it all would be better if ZFS would be Apache licensed. That way it would be compatible with both GPLv2 and CDDL licensed contributions, and everyone would stop bugging ZFS about it.
In the CDDL, like the MPL that it was modeled after, forward compatibility is not opt-in—unlike the GPL, where you explicitly have to state that it's under any later version if you want to allow for that. (The CDDL does allow you restrict the code to a specific version, but you have to explicitly opt out.)
The CDDL is at 1.0. Sun (Oracle) is the license steward. If they publish CDDL 1.1 tomorrow, and it says you can use the software under the terms of the MIT License, then every CDDL project in existence that didn't explicitly opt out will be available under very permissive terms.
That's a whole lot easier than relicensing the kernel.
> because it would be hard (if even possible) to get every ZoL contributor to relicense
I think this is the fundamental point that 'ajross disagrees with.
First, they could dump the code and rewrite it. That solves the actual problem (getting a ZFS under GPL) without actually relicensing. If the code from non-Oracle owners is small, that's reasonable.
Second, they could ignore their copyrights. I believe this is legal in many jurisdictions where you have many of the copyright holders on board; in particular, for many small patches, they are too small to be copyrightable. (The FSF, for instance, doesn't require copyright assignment if your patch is under 15 lines or otherwise not "legally significant", like a mechanical find/replace.) That's why Conservancy can't file lawsuits with anyone in the entire `git log` of Linux who's contributed one or two patches once, but needs someone who wrote something at least somewhat substantial.
See also this VLC blog post and its discussion of French law:
Third, per that VLC blog post, it is empirically possible to get every contributor to a large project to relicense. And VLC's ownership is almost certainly more varied than ZFS's.
I'll try to be a little clearer, but it's basically what I started with and ended with (which you actually appear to agree with)
1.) SFC says 'in this context, Oracle could make everyone's life easier by waving their magic relicensing wand'
2.) I say 'That's not much of an argument.'
3.) I say 'lists 73 authors not including the Oracle developers, which appear to be both individuals (gmail accounts, etc) and multiple individual businesses (nexenta, ovh, etc)'
4.) I say 'It really seems like neither could easily relicense, so there is no magic wand.'
In other words, there is no 'magic wand' because even if Oracle magically did there thing it would not fix the issue that FSC has with Canonical because the actual 'ZFS on Linux' code would still be licensed as CDDL. So it's 'not much of an argument' because it would be hard (if even possible) to get every ZoL contributor to relicense, and thus doesn't solve the problem.
To argue that this is somehow of equivalent complexity
You seem to be getting stuck on some issue of relicensing being equivalent. From a mathematical point of view, I'm sure you could assign some probability to both events (with Linux relicensing having a smaller chance), but it seems like for all intents and purposes, it's zero (even if Oracle relicensed). Do two events have to have equivalent complexity in order to be basically irrelevant as FSC argument? Seems to me like it's just FSC finger-pointing as rhetorical trick (and thus my pointing out it's lack of merit)