Ubuntu 16.04 LTS arrives today complete with forbidden ZFS
-
Canonical will today (April 21st) launch version 16.04 of its Ubuntu Linux distribution, Xenial Xerus, the new long-term-support version of the project.
As the name suggests, long-term support versions of Ubuntu get, er, long-term support, a guaranteed five years from today to be precise.
The Xenial Xerus will therefore be fed, watered and de-loused for years to come, making them a fine platform for serious endeavours.
Canonical thinks the Xerus are ideal for cloudy, containerised computing. ZFS is pitched as one of several features that make the distribution ideal for such roles.
The LXD hypervisor is central to Canonical's containerisation ambitions, as it offers greater speed and density for guests and therefore makes its containers-inside-lightweight-VMs play possible. The inclusion of Ceph adds scale for storage, which helps Ubuntu to take on weightier tasks, with or without OpenStack.
So far, so good. Yet no less an entity than GNU daddy Richard Stallman thinks Canonical is violating the GNU GPL because you can't blend GPL code and non-GPL code. The Software Freedom Conservancy agrees and has form for funding court actions that test the GPL, as the case involving VMwareindicates.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/21/ubuntu_16_04_lts_launched/
-
Is this the final code? Seems to be?
-
@aaronstuder said in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS arrives today complete with forbidden ZFS:
As the name suggests, long-term support versions of Ubuntu get, er, long-term support, a guaranteed five years from today to be precise.
The Xenial Xerus will therefore be fed, watered and de-loused for years to come, making them a fine platform for serious endeavours.
Yeah, they've made this claim on the marketing side before but their engineering and support teams have said that it isn't the case. It gets more support than non-LTS releases that are also old, but it does not get the full support or what the industry normally calls support in an LTS way at all. You can't stay behind on an LTS release and get long term support.
http://mangolassi.it/topic/8737/how-ubuntu-lts-support-works
-
My server download is underway.
-
Looks like a GPL lawsuit is certain to be forthcoming. Has Ubuntu made any statement as to why they either think that violating the GPL is fine or why they feel that they've bypassed a decade of belief that this is a violation?
-
The next question is... how long until Linux Mint based on 16.04 releases?
-
@StrongBad said in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS arrives today complete with forbidden ZFS:
The next question is... how long until Linux Mint based on 16.04 releases?
What is Mint 18 going to be based on?
-
I believe that 18 is going to be on 16.04, but when is that coming?
-
I believe I read that they are shooting for a May/June release.... but that could be off base
-
This is what they posted on their insights.ubuntu.com page:
We at 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. Others have independently achieved the >same conclusion. Differing opinions exist, but please bear in mind that these are opinions.
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.
And zfs.ko, as a self-contained file system module, is clearly not a derivative work of the Linux kernel but rather quite obviously a derivative work of OpenZFS and OpenSolaris. Equivalent exceptions have existed for many years, for various other stand alone, self-contained, non-GPL kernel modules.
Our conclusion is good for Ubuntu users, good for Linux, and good for all of free and open source software.
-
While that makes sense, the issue that they are mentioning there is not the issue that the FSF has with it. So they are ignoring the question at hand, which is distributing them together.
