> The owners of CDDL-licensed code aren't complaining about a CDDL violation
That may be true for the authors of ZFS (and I don't know that it is, but we can agree to accept that it might be true). There are people, though, that when looking for a license to use when releasing their software specifically choose one that is known to be incompatible with the GPL. Among them are people who go with the CDDL.
Saying that we should ignore the license text and treat the CDDL as compatible affects more than just the authors of the project we're talking about.
And if the authors of the code in question are really okay with it being combined with the GPL, then at any time they can make that explicit offering it under a license that is widely accepted to be compatible.
Who are the only ones who have a legal interest in the manner in which the CDDL-licensed code at issue is used.
The fact that other people issue code with a license with the same text has no bearing on anything.
> Saying that we should ignore the license text and treat the CDDL as compatible affects more than just the authors of the project we're talking about.
No one is saying that, the argument is that this is not legally a derived work of the GPL-licensed work, so that neither the GPL nor compatibility between the CDDL and the GPL is relevant. No one involved has argued that the CDDL is, or should be treated as, compatible with the GPL.
The CDDL-licensed code is being distributed under the CDDL alone, not the GPL. That's the whole reason some people on the GPL side are complaining. I can't even see what people on the CDDL side would have to complain about under any interpretation of copyright law or either license that anyone has publicly made ever.
> There are people, though, that when looking for a license to use when releasing their software specifically choose one that is known to be incompatible with the GPL.
The issue at hand is not that the CDDL licensed software is being re-distributed under a GPL license. It's not. The issue is whether or not GPL software and CDDL software can interact in such a way as to violate the GPL license.
I doubt very much that "this can't be ported to a Linux kernel module" was a deciding factor when choosing the CDDL. If it was such an important factor, then they should have modified the CDDL to add such language to the license, which would make this issue much more clear.
I doubt very much that "this can't be ported to a Linux kernel module" was a deciding factor when choosing the CDDL.
The fly in that ointment is Danise Cooper's claim that they chose to base the CDDL on Mozilla's MPL 1.0 license in part for its GPL-incompatibility.
On the other hand, Sun's "Chief Open Source Officer", who introduced her at that talk as "the person who actually wrote the CDDL", later wrote she said that out of spite for losing the argument for licensing OpenSolaris as GPL.
Are you arguing that the licensing requirements of the CDDL are the problem here? To the best of my knowledge (though I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice) that is not the case.
My understanding is that what Canonical is doing here is not a violation of any CDDL licensing terms, and the legal question is purely of whether or not it is a violation of GPL license terms.
> There are people, though, that when looking for a license to use when releasing their software specifically choose one that is known to be incompatible with the GPL. Among them are people who go with the CDDL.
Are there really? Are there any who state so publicly? Or is this a purely theoretical concern?
Good point. I don't think I've ever heard of CDDL ever being used except by Sun (and Oracle as Sun's successor), and people redistributing work (or derivatives of work) originally released by Sun/Oracle.
I would imagine that the decision to use CDDL by anyone other than Sun/Oracle is based almost completely on "its the only license under which Sun/Oracle will allow me to release this work".
You will find that most fans of the CDDL are bigger fans of BSD licensing (e.g. node.js is BSD licensed), but there are a couple examples.
Offhand, I know that star and cdrtools are under a variant of the CDDL called CDDL-Schily, which is the CDDL with an addendum that software under it is "governed by the laws of Germany".
star and cdrtools are developed by someone who really loves Solaris and wants to make Linux more like it. Relicensing then under CDDL is just part of it; cdrtools also use Solaris-style device names even under Linux and he got quite angry with distros for patching it to use Linux's native device naming.
That may be true for the authors of ZFS (and I don't know that it is, but we can agree to accept that it might be true). There are people, though, that when looking for a license to use when releasing their software specifically choose one that is known to be incompatible with the GPL. Among them are people who go with the CDDL.
Saying that we should ignore the license text and treat the CDDL as compatible affects more than just the authors of the project we're talking about.
And if the authors of the code in question are really okay with it being combined with the GPL, then at any time they can make that explicit offering it under a license that is widely accepted to be compatible.