And the only pertinent clause would be in the GPL (the CDDL doesn't care), regarding if ZFS were a derivative work of Linux, which it plainly is not.
All this "GPL and CDDL are incompatible!" is nonsense.
All this "GPL and CDDL are incompatible!" is nonsense.
That seems to strongly contradict your "it plainly is not" claim.
As for GPLv2/CDDL incompatibility being "nonsense", I suggest you re-read the above. They are incompatible. The questions are:
- How much do the kernel devs care? They're the only ones in a position to complain, since as you say it's the GPL on their code being violated. The answer seems to be "not much", since CDDL is "in the spirit" of the GPL.
- How much would the legal system care if a complaint was made? As that SFLC link says, probably "not much", since it seems hard to argue that much/any physical or economic damage has been done, or any malicious intent (again, it preserves the "spirit")
- How much do Canonical care about the damage of a possible complaint? Clearly not enough to stop them going ahead.
- How much do users care about Canonical's risk-taking? Most users probably don't care.
I can imagine some 'enterprise level' (potential) customers who may run at the sight of "potential lawsuit", despite the "potential" seeming to be low, and the fallout from such a lawsuit being pretty insignificant (as SFLC says, since there's no malicious intent, it would probably just require a switch to Debian's model going forward, which would cause a little disruption but no real damage)
So, all the ZFS on Linux users are okay until Oracle sees money in suing them.
What evidence is there of this?
The closest I can find is where Simon Phipps said "to be GPL compatible you actually have to be willing to have your license discarded and replaced with the GPL. It's more a Borg-like assimilation than compatibility, in my view, and pretty undesirable as it results in future code enrichment being accumulated in some other code commons." https://web.archive.org/web/20050420234857/http://blogs.sun....
Linux won't(/can't) be changing from GPLv2 any time soon though. I don't know about Sun's intentions.
It seems fair to anticipate no law suits since as far as I'm aware kernel developers have never filed a law suit against companies committing really blatant infringement. Most of the action there seemed to come from the BusyBox project.