Canonical have conducted a legal review, including discussion with the
industry's leading software freedom legal counsel, of the licenses that
apply to the Linux kernel and to ZFS. And in doing so, we have concluded
that we are acting within the rights granted and in compliance with
their terms of both of those licenses.
While the CDDL and GPLv2
are both "copyleft" licenses, they have different scope. The CDDL
applies to all files under the CDDL, while the GPLv2 applies to
derivative works. The CDDL cannot apply to the Linux kernel because
zfs.ko is a self-contained file system module -- the kernel itself is
quite obviously not a derivative work of this new file system.
