If I know that Canonical can't legally distribute ZFS in whatever format to me, and yet I use Canonical's distribution of ZFS, isn't there a legal risk there? After all, it would turn out that I have no license to use said distribution of ZFS as such a license was never conferred to me by someone with the legal right to do so.
Generally speaking, courts would probably give me the benefit of the doubt if I had no reason to believe that they couldn't distribute it to me - but as I knew they couldn't (the issues with ZFS and the Linux kernel are well-documented), and I knew I'm using it, they'd probably hold me in violation of copyright.
>If I know that Canonical can't legally distribute ZFS in whatever format to me, and yet I use Canonical's distribution of ZFS, isn't there a legal risk there?
If you somehow knew that any form of distribution was illegal that would be the case. I haven't heard anyone saying that's the case, distributing it bundled with GPL software is potentially breaks the GPL.
Generally speaking, courts would probably give me the benefit of the doubt if I had no reason to believe that they couldn't distribute it to me - but as I knew they couldn't (the issues with ZFS and the Linux kernel are well-documented), and I knew I'm using it, they'd probably hold me in violation of copyright.