&gt; The owners of CDDL-licensed code aren&#x27;t complaining about a CDDL violation<p>That may be true for the authors of ZFS (and I don&#x27;t know that it is, but we can agree to accept that it might be true).  There are people, though, that when looking for a license to use when releasing their software specifically choose one that is known to be incompatible with the GPL.  Among them are people who go with the CDDL.<p>Saying that we should ignore the license text and treat the CDDL as compatible affects more than just the authors of the project we&#x27;re talking about.<p>And if the authors of the code in question are really okay with it being combined with the GPL, then at any time they can make that explicit offering it under a license that is widely accepted to be compatible.