This can be game-changing for the NAS/SAN industry.
I'm surprised their lawyers gave an OK, where FSF, SFLC and friends have given a thumbs down. If their interpretation is good, suddenly the large AIX/Solaris dominated storage boxes open up to a LOT of ubuntu-based/ubuntu-derived competition.
> I'm surprised their lawyers gave an OK, where FSF, SFLC and friends have given a thumbs down.
I'm not. FSF and SFLC have institutional incentives to support the maximum remotely defensible interpretation of the scope of copyright holders rights, since they are ideological organizations who rely on the maximum amount of code possible being subject to the restrictions of the GPL.
They are among the least likely organizations on Earth to publicly present a balanced view of the scope of copyright law particularly as it addresses coverage of derivative works.
They certainly have reasons to be biased but saying they are among the least likely is unnecessary hyperbole. I'd say they're just as likely, at most, as the lawyer of any copyright holder is when discussing whether something is a derived work of their property.
The other party here has their own interests and biases here as well, of course. Let's not forget how many companies in the mobile and embedded space have repeatedly chosen to violate the GPL even when their noncompliance has been obvious.
I'm curious exactly what the quality of Canonical's legal advice is and how much those lawyers understand open source licensing and IP law in general. It took "two years of negotiations" for them to state that, for packages under the GPL, their GPL-incompatible license on Ubuntu as a whole did not apply.
(It's still the case that non-GPL binary packages in Ubuntu, that is, stuff under MIT, BSD, etc. licenses, may not be redistributed. This is legal for the same reason that using that code in proprietary software is legal.)
This is my #1 question. Can we use it for the root FS? If so, that's amazing, as there are already btrfs-based tools for snapshotting every time you run apt, etc.
I expect those issues to be resolved before 16.04 is released. Even with those fixes, the interactive installer doesn't support ZFS yet so you will still need to drop to a shell to actually setup your zpool and your partitions.
I'm surprised their lawyers gave an OK, where FSF, SFLC and friends have given a thumbs down. If their interpretation is good, suddenly the large AIX/Solaris dominated storage boxes open up to a LOT of ubuntu-based/ubuntu-derived competition.
Exciting times..