&gt; <i>Who says they&#x27;re expending resources on Canonical?</i><p>Well, <i>they</i> say it, right there in the article: &quot;<i>Conservancy contacted Canonical to inform them of their GPL violation</i>&quot;. And at the end of the article, when they say &quot;<i>Our lawyers, in conjunction with our GPL compliance and software forensics experts, have analyzed the Linux+ZFS that Canonical includes in their Ubuntu 16.04 prereleases</i>&quot;. That&#x27;s three kinds of experts, all doing &quot;analysis&quot;.<p>And I say it above, when I talk about the article itself taking effort to write and the conversations it references also taking effort. These kinds of contacts aren&#x27;t a one-sentence email fired off to &#x27;hello@canonical.com&#x27;. They have to be thought out and worded correctly, and they engaged in a conversation afterwards. No, it&#x27;s not like that email takes a week to write, but neither is it trivial; it&#x27;s the result of thought, debate, and conversations.<p>&gt; <i>So distributing CDDL&#x27;d source and asking the user to do &quot;make zfs.ko&quot; is fine.</i><p>I really think you&#x27;re missing my point. You keep speaking to the technical argument - I am not saying there is no merit in the technical argument. I want to reiterate (for the third time) that I think that this is far too small fry for a resource-starved group to chase after. Yes, there is a distinction here. No, it&#x27;s not worth the time to chase, given other, more severe violations.<p>I am making a <i>starved resources</i> argument, not a <i>technical merits</i> argument. In the grand scheme in the world of violations of free software licenses, Canonical&#x27;s violation (providing a binary <i>and</i> the source it came from, not just the source) is about as mild as you can get. The <i>core spirit</i> of the GPL (that the source code is freely available) is not compromised by the presence or absence of a build artifact.