Torvalds indirectly made a strong case for ZFS being a not-derived work all the way back in 2003: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gossamer-threads.com&#x2F;lists&#x2F;linux&#x2F;kernel&#x2F;401977#401977" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gossamer-threads.com&#x2F;lists&#x2F;linux&#x2F;kernel&#x2F;401977#40...</a><p>He states: &quot;having been developed totally independently of Linux: they literally were developed  before Linux even existed, by people who had zero knowledge of Linux. That tends to strengthen the argument that they clearly aren&#x27;t derived.&quot;<p>He does continue to say that he believe it would be &quot;hard to argue that any new driver or filesystem was developed without any thought of Linux&quot;, although in the specific case of ZFS (as opposed to, say, nvidia.ko), I think there would be a strong argument that the ZFS module was originally written in whole as a non-derived work.<p>(Obviously, Linus is not the only stakeholder here, and even his own opinion may have changed since then. Still, it&#x27;s not a new conversation and the community hasn&#x27;t been too ruffled by the status quo for the past 13 years)