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FWIW, Canonical's legal analysis also concluded the licenses were not incompatible in this instance (though potentially for very different reasons than you do).

http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2016/02/zfs-licensing-and-lin...

(edit: When I wrote this comment, the person I was responding to had only left a relatively short comment, without the argument or the subsequent bullet points.)

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They didn't conclude that the licenses were not incompatible, they concluded that ZFS for Linux is not sufficiently based on the Linux kernel for the licenses to interact.

Their conclusion was that zfs.ko, as a self-contained file system module, is not a derivative work of the Linux kernel but rather a derivative work of OpenZFS and OpenSolaris.

This is the biggest weakness of the GPL IMHO. The fluffy wording which is sometimes so vague only a court can really tell if something is allowed or not.

For example the GPL talks a lot about linking. Now how does that work with languages where there is no linking at build time (like Java)? The GPL's architects tells us that doesn't matter because its all in the same spirit. But that's just an opinion, you need a court to rule on that to be sure.

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