My point earlier is that there is way too much investment in zfs. Oracle is not the kind of company to sue or force IP over tiny communities. I do wonder whats happening at WD now. If someone grows big enough to be "shiny" i think then oracle will try to stop them. Think of the big companies invested now.. netgear, wd, samsung, intel, IBM all have some investment in zfs. If they were going to bring in the lawyers they would have shut down IBM or canonical.
Like earlier in this thread, if oracle was going to get lawyers involved, they would have done it already. The one platform that make a ton of money for them is the ZFS appliance. Although solaris eng might be dead, doesn't mean the zfs platform is. If i had a crystal ball I would see them thinking what I have thought for years.. Why would I pay some little company 100's a TB when I can get solaris support per core. The business model doesn't make sense, even for the zfs appliance. Solaris per core support is multi X cheaper. Run on commodity hardware and you can have petabytes at singles thousands for support costs for global support.