On 04/16/2015 01:21 PM, Alec Leamas wrote:
Saw message [1]. I understand that we need more meat on that bone to say
anything specific. That said, is there are chance that we could add
libdvdcss and XFS to fedora (libdvdcss is my primary interest)?
I doubt it seriously.
libdvdcss is considered copy protection circumvention code in the United
States, where the DMCA forbids such things (and there is no exception
that Fedora is currently able to leverage). I am unaware of any changes
in US law (proposed or coming) that would change this for us.
ZFS is an out of tree kernel module, which we do not permit in Fedora
because of the maintenance nightmare they are, but even if we did, we
wouldn't permit it because it is licensed in an incompatible way with
the parts of the linux kernel it depends on. The stance of Fedora is
that building ZFS as a CDDL licensed module does not make it an
independent work, it still requires the tight connection with the GPL
licensed kernel framework. It does not and cannot stand alone, thus, the
combined work (the ZFS kernel module) cannot be distributed by Fedora
and be in compliance with both CDDL and GPL simultaneously.
This aspect of the CDDL was intentional by Sun, as was its choice of use
for ZFS. All of this pain is fruit of that rotten tree. Oracle could at
any point resolve this by relicensing (or dual-licensing) ZFS, but they
have not opted to do that for at least 7 years.
*****
Now, this Debian email is very short on details as to what legal grounds
they feel that they could include ZFS under. I would be very interested
in reading the specifics that they received from the SFLC on this
matter, but they're under no obligation to share them.
Also, as I've shared many many times before, our legal decisions are not
taken on the grounds of "$FOO distribution does it, we can too". We
certainly factor in the status and stances of other distributions when
reviewing situations, but we do not jump off bridges simply because
others are doing so. Red Hat bears responsibility for Fedora, and Red
Hat's financial success makes it a lucrative target for litigation that
few other Linux distributions come even close to.
~tom
==
Red Hat
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