It's a fair critique though I didn't write this because I thought I was breaking news. The Canonical announcement was honestly exciting for me, in particular because they evaluated the licensing issues and decided that they were within their rights to provide ZFS to their users. It seemed though that the voices of practitioners was being drowned out by those focusing exclusively on legal matters. I was hoping to provide some information for those unacquainted with both the technology and the legal miasma. Regardless, I'm excited that ZFS is about to have many more users.
"Nominal statutory damages, divided among the thousands of copyright holders entitled to equal shares, scarcely lift the matter above the level of damnum absque injuria."
Lots of people do exactly that. In fact, many companies even use software for which the licenses have lapsed or they never owned licenses in the first place. Sometimes it's by accident; in other cases it's a knowing acceptance of risk.
"As with anything, evaluate the technology, evaluate the risks, and move on."
I've been selling to enterprise customers for a little while now. All technology has risk, new technology and the status quo alike. Companies weigh those risks against the expected benefits. Some folks will obviously avoid the brouhaha completely; it makes sense. Others will decide that the benefits outweigh the risk; there's nothing less comprehensible about that decision.
"In the end, perhaps what matters is that Ubuntu users should be able to use ZFS without fear of consequences. However, morally they should be aware that ZFS in Ubuntu is a violation in the opinion of many the experts."
I don't trust the author on matters of jurisprudence or technology; I certainly don't on matters of morality.
Take ZFS. I designed the flash integration for ZFS; it's used as a caching tier. ZFS is definitely not optimized for use with flash as its primary backing store. The same is true for some of the other filesystems in the list; offhand: CASL and WAFL.
Most of the rest are designed for embedded use cases, are research toys, or are embedded research toys.
It seems to be geared only towards research insititutes and a specific one at that, most of the work using OpenSSD is concentrated on that one university.
