The original intent of the license authors is irrelevant. The aspect of the CDDL that makes it incompatible with GPL is present in the GPL too. Neither license is more or less "dogshit" than the other, they are the same. The difference is the CDDL only applies to code written under the CDDL, whereas the GPL spreads to everything it touches.
If Linux had been under the CDDL, ZFS would have chosen another license. Sun management at the time saw Linux as their primary competitor, and ZFS and DTrace was the crown jewels of Solaris. Just open sourcing was reported to have been a long internal struggle by the people involved, and there's no chance they would have let the Linux distributors use them for free.
Good or bad, it's the result of another era. Still impressive stuff. It's only recently that things like btrfs and eBPF became usable enough, and not in all situations.
> The original intent of the license authors is irrelevant.
what on earth is that supposed to mean? ZFS is not in the Linux kernel because Sun and then Oracle deliberately decided to do that and continue to want that to be the case. The Linux kernel can't be re-licensed, (the Oracle and Sun code in) ZFS could be relicenced in ten minutes if they cared.
> The aspect of the CDDL that makes it incompatible with GPL is present in the GPL too. Neither license is more or less "dogshit" than the other, they are the same. The difference is the CDDL only applies to code written under the CDDL, whereas the GPL spreads to everything it touches.
It means that the original authors could have originally intended to write a recipe for chocolate chip cookies and somehow accidentally wrote the CDDL. That wouldn't change a thing and it wouldn't make the CDDL any better or worse since it would have exactly the same words. The intent is irrelevant, all that matters is the end result.
> ZFS could be relicenced in ten minutes if they cared.
Indeed, I hope that they do. A copyfree license like the BSD licenses would make ZFS significantly more popular and I think would have saved all the effort sunk into btrfs had it been done earlier.
That aspect of the GPL is what any software end-user should want, all the source code, for every part of what you are using.
It is a shame Oracle hasn't released a CDDLv2 that provides GPL compatibility, they could solve the incompatibility quite easily, since CDDLv1 has an auto-update clause by default. I think some of OpenZFS has CDDLv1-only code, but that could probably be removed or replaced.
