&gt; &quot;distribute the binary, not okay; distribute the source + tell user to &#x27;make&#x27;, okay&quot;<p>That&#x27;s literally what the GPL says. Look, I&#x27;m not a GPL zealot. The only thing even vaguely worth releasing, I&#x27;ve released 2-clause BSD.<p>But we can&#x27;t just pick which bits of a license we feel good about and ignore the bits we don&#x27;t - that doesn&#x27;t exactly make a strong case for potential GPL violators to give a shit about copyright.<p>It&#x27;s crappy behaviour from Canonical. I think there&#x27;s another strategic motive here, they know they&#x27;re stretching things a lot here but perhaps they see this as a catalyst to finally see some movement on ZFS licensing by various parties (or maybe they&#x27;re acting on VMWare&#x27;s behalf by sucking energy away from SC&#x27;s VMWare case)