Re: Effectively force all GNOME users to locally compile ZFS?

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli <GNUtoo@cyberdimension.org>]

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On Sat, 3 Jul 2021 21:46:29 +0100
Domagoj Stolfa <ds815@gmx.com> wrote:

> Hi:
> 
> On Sat, Jul 03, 2021 at 10:16:54PM +0200, Tobias Geerinckx-Rice wrote:
> > Maxime,
> > 
> > Maxime Devos 写道：
> > > <snip>
> > 
> > That's a very good idea if possible.
> 
> Why can substitutes not be offered for ZFS as a standalone module?
> I'm not a lawyer nor do I understand much lawyerese, but AIUI, the
> problem stems from the FSF lawyers thinking it wouldn't stand up in
> court to distribute CDDL software linked against GPL'd software as
> one big binary. Could someone please explain why it would not be
> acceptable to distribute substitutes of ZFS as a *standalone kernel
> module*, rather than as a part of linux-libre?
- The ZFS kernel module is a derived work of Linux.
- Linux is under the GPLv2 and compatible licenses.
- The ZFS kernel module has code that is only available under the
  CDDL license.
- The CDDL license is incompatible with the GPLv2.

So while I can change the license of Linux for any license I want and/or
make derived work under incompatible licenses for fun on my laptop, I
can't redistribute that work. Even in source code form[1].

The same applies to the ZFS kernel module source code and binaries.

And so because of that images with gnome can't be redistributed without
violating the GPL. And the corresponding source of the ZFS package is
also violating the GPL.

So the question is how to deal with it in Guix. 

We need to remove that kernel module from Guix, but the question is how.

In Parabola there is a mechanism to produce patched source releases of
software. 

Is there something in Guix that could produce a modified source code
tarball (without the kernel module code) that users could download with
guix build --source? Or do we need to patch the source?

I think we really need to fix that, at least in FSDG distributions
because if for some reason we start depending functionalities that
violates the GPL GPL, we would then have some strong interest in having
the GPLv2 be void and unenforcable.

Alternatively we could start working on and/or funding a ZFS driver for
Linux that is compatible with the GPLv2+, but I really wonder if it's a
good use of resources given that we now have an equivalent filesystem
(BTRFS), and that doing that is probably a lot of work which might even
never get done in the first place.

In addition, that ZFS kernel module doesn't build for i686 because
apparently there is no Makefile for that architecture. So depending on
it probably makes gnome only usable for architectures supported by that
kernel module.

Denis.

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