> > The SFConservancy is just practicing GPL overreach here, and is rattling a saber in hopes that Oracle blinks.
> Why would Oracle care? Oracle is not involved in OpenZFS and has closed source all of their changes for a while. The new code (which is a lot) is not owned by Oracle. It is owned by the individual contributors as OpenZFS is not doing copyright assignments.
That's not how copyright works, and we've all seen how zealous Oracle loves to get with copyright arguments (the Android thing, for example).
All ZFS contributions before the illumos split were assigned to Oracle because they had a CLA with all contributors. I'd still argue they definitely have copyright ownership (the current source is based on the original files, no doubt about it).
They don't own the current code, but all contributions are based on diffs on the original code. The contributors own their changes, but not the code as a whole. I don't believe that it's ever been tested in court how many incremental changes are enough to remove the original copyright owners' copyright claims. Especially when it comes to something like ZFS where there are data structures that were designed a long time ago and they must be kept (as well as the code for handling them) for backwards compatibility essentially indefinitely.
The issue isn't removing the original copyright holders claim. No one is saying that's possible. Oracle is free to relicense the code they own at any time, but that relicense doesn't affect the code written by others and Oracle does not have rights to that code unless they had a CLA. The new OpenZFS code is not under a CLA.
This probably doesn't affect the argument one way or the other, but in Germany, if some company employs you, and you write some code as part of your work for that company, AFAIK, copyright for that code automatically belongs to the company.
There are even cases where copyright for code you write after leaving the company could be considered to belong to that company.
The basic argument is that the OpenZFS folks have not been assigning their copyrights to Oracle after the Sun buyout and are not subject to what you have encountered in Germany (which I find just wrong, sorry for your troubles). Perhaps LGPL would be a better license for an OS (might be an interesting discussion).
I have not had any troubles with this legal situation. When I am employed at a company that pays me to write code for them, I have no problem with the company owning the copyright.
And none of my former employers have ever tried to claim copyright on any code I have written once I stopped working there. Actually, I do not know of any specific case where this has happened.
> Why would Oracle care? Oracle is not involved in OpenZFS and has closed source all of their changes for a while. The new code (which is a lot) is not owned by Oracle. It is owned by the individual contributors as OpenZFS is not doing copyright assignments.
That's not how copyright works, and we've all seen how zealous Oracle loves to get with copyright arguments (the Android thing, for example).