&gt; because it would be hard (if even possible) to get every ZoL contributor to relicense<p>I think this is the fundamental point that &#x27;ajross disagrees with.<p>First, they could dump the code and rewrite it. That solves the actual problem (getting <i>a</i> ZFS under GPL) without actually relicensing. If the code from non-Oracle owners is small, that&#x27;s reasonable.<p>Second, they could ignore their copyrights. I believe this is legal in many jurisdictions where you have many of the copyright holders on board; in particular, for many small patches, they are too small to be copyrightable. (The FSF, for instance, doesn&#x27;t require copyright assignment if your patch is under 15 lines or otherwise not &quot;legally significant&quot;, like a mechanical find&#x2F;replace.) That&#x27;s why Conservancy can&#x27;t file lawsuits with anyone in the entire `git log` of Linux who&#x27;s contributed one or two patches once, but needs someone who wrote something at least somewhat substantial.<p>See also this VLC blog post and its discussion of French law:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jbkempf.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;post&#x2F;2012&#x2F;How-to-properly-relicense-a-large-open-source-project-part-3" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jbkempf.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;post&#x2F;2012&#x2F;How-to-properly-relice...</a><p>Third, per that VLC blog post, it <i>is</i> empirically possible to get every contributor to a large project to relicense. And VLC&#x27;s ownership is almost certainly more varied than ZFS&#x27;s.