I don't understand this line of reasoning, where somebody can say, "person A at Sun says it was intentional", then somebody else says, "person B at Sun says it wasn't intentional", and then acts as if that settles the matter.
All it means is that there's contention about it at best.
... and whether it was intentional or not doesn't affect what the text actually says.
You also ignore the binary kernel object point: Nvidia's drivers are completely proprietary and closed source. How is that in any way less of a violation?
I don't want to seem like I'm trying to dominate the conversation.
(In the meantime, please see my other comments.)
Oracle isn't exactly known for their attempts at fostering good-will with the open source community. Considering that, I don't think they have much incentive to complain now, even if their lawyers are 100% sure that there is a violation of their copyright.
Instead they can just wait for Canonical to hang themselves, then sue them and their customers for the fair market value plus damages. (Maybe they'll offer Canonical's customers a good deal when they switch to Oracle Linux.)
But my point was: IF Oracle thinks their copyright is being violated, they wouldn't complain NOW. If they don't think so, they wouldn't complain either. So Oracle staying silent shouldn't be taken as a signal of their opinion on the matter.
If you look at the .diff.gz associated with Xenial's kernel, linked from http://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/linux-image-4.4.0-7-generi... you will see that this diff adds spl/ and zfs/ directories to the linux source tree. I believe, but don't know for certain because the "[list of files]" links are all broken at the time I write this message, that zfs.ko is in the same binary .deb package as the GPL'd kernel.
That's not to say that mere aggregation is enough to trigger the portions of the GPL that also require a derived work in the copyright sense, but the Conservancy post we started with lays out in detail their view: A particular zfs.ko does nothing until it is linked with a matching version of the Linux kernel; the fact that the linking is dynamic and not static is irrelevant in their analysis.
Canonical hasn't shipped their distro with the ZFS kernel module yet. My impression of Oracle is that they let their lawsuits do the talking.
>You also ignore the binary kernel object point: Nvidia's drivers are completely proprietary and closed source. How is that in any way less of a violation?
AFAIK NVidia's drivers are not a default part of any distribution (including Ubuntu from Canonical) and has to be enabled/installed explicitly by the end user, meanwhile Canonical said they were going to make the ZFS kernel module part of their default distribution.