Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Apr 27, 2015 at 12:10 PM, Joerg Schilling > <Joerg.Schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de> wrote: > > > > > If you combine ZFS and Linux, you create a permitted "collective work" and the > > GPL cannot extend it's rules to the CDDLd separate and independend work ZFS of > > course. > > Which countries' copyright laws would permit that explicitly even when > some of the components' licenses prohibit it? Fortunately, Europe and the USA declare the same parts of the GPL void, these parts would prevent such a combination. In the USA, the GPL is a legal construct called "license" for customer protection and a "license" is limited to only make claims that are listed in: US Copyright law title 17 paragraph 106 The GPL makes claims that are in conflict with the law because these claims are not amongst what the list in the law permits and that are thus void. The same parts of the GPL are void in the EU because they are writen in an ambiguous way. For customer protection, the rules for "general conditions" and these rules permit the customer to select the interpretation that is best for the customer in such a case. Both legal systems have the same results: They prevent the GPL from using it's own interpretation os what a derivative work is and the rules from the laws apply instead. These rules make many combinations a "collective work" that is permitted. The cdrtools and ZFS on Linux match these rules - well, I assume that the ZFS integration code follows the rules that are needed for a clean collective work. Cdrtools follow these rules: - No code from CDDL and GPL is mixed into a single file - Non-GPL code used in a colective work was implemented independently from the GPLd parts and form a separate work that may be used without the GPLd code as well. Jörg -- EMail:joerg at schily.net (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/'