[anon1385]

Well you can read the thread on the mailing list but to put it bluntly - because they wanted to stop ZoL from working. They view non-GPL kernel modules as a violation of the GPL.

"My tolerance for ZFS is pretty non-existant" Greg Kroah-Hartman

"please switch to FreeBSD instead of advocating to violate the copyright and licensing rule on my and others work." Christoph Hellwig

[cthalupa]

For context, Hellwig is the guy that tried to sue vmware in Germany and had the case dismissed because the evidence submitted summed up to references of stuff on the internet and basically copy and pasted git output. It didn't even include details on which lines of code were allegedly used by vmware, or details on authorship in any of the code comparisons that were present.

Which is a shame, because it would have been nice to see if the shim usage pattern is actually a violation of the GPL - a lot of us would like a clear ruling there. I'm sympathetic to his viewpoint, but that whole ordeal was a bit of a "wtf?" because of how it was handled, and I can't imagine him being sympathetic to anything else in an even somewhat similar situation.

[monocasa]

AFAIK, the VMware stuff is beyond shim usage. They straight up replace the kernel and run GPLed drivers inside their kernel.

[shawnz]

> They view non-GPL kernel modules as a violation of the GPL.

But then why allow them?

[bluGill]

users demand it. If the kernel devs pushed too hard legally a lot of users would switch to BSD (probably freebsd, but there are other good candidates). Linux is slightly better for desktop users, but if you cannot use your graphics hardware for legal reasons BSD will still work and is the lesser evil.