&gt; That may be true for the authors of ZFS<p>Who are the only ones who have a legal interest in the manner in which the CDDL-licensed code at issue is used.<p>The fact that other people issue code with a license with the same text has no bearing on anything.<p>&gt; 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>No one is saying that, the argument is that this is not legally a derived work of the GPL-licensed work, so that neither the GPL <i>nor</i> compatibility between the CDDL and the GPL is <i>relevant</i>. No one involved has argued that the CDDL is, or should be treated as, compatible with the GPL.<p>The CDDL-licensed code is being distributed under the CDDL alone, not the GPL. That&#x27;s the whole reason some people on the GPL side are complaining. I can&#x27;t even see what people on the CDDL side would have to complain about under any interpretation of copyright law or either license that anyone has publicly made ever.