@Eric: AFP support would of course be Apple’s problem. It’s
up to their OS architecture how much the disk filesystem needs
to be aware of being served out via AFP, or vice versa (although
to be consistent with the rest of zfs’s behavior, adding a shareafp
property wouldn’t be unreasonable, IMO). While Sun doesn’t support
AFP, I’ve got netatalk running perfectly happily on Solaris 9 and
SXCE; it doesn’t take advantage of zfs features to do a nicer job
of storing resource forks and Finder attributes and such metadata,
but in principle it could be modified to do so, allowing OSs supporting
zfs to do a very nice job of AFP serving.

The most credible explanation I’ve seen (aside from that it
might not have been quite ready yet anyway) is
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2009-October/033125.html

Unfortunately, I suspect that it boils down to another case of
lawyers trumping functionality…

First off, as I mentioned earlier I am a Mac user and, I should add, a strong SYS V derivative user/administrator/developer as well (ive been a fan of the BSD’s and Solaris since 7 linux as well) and as such this is a very torn subject for me. You see, I really love technology, the ideas that it spurs and working with people that share this passion and as such it is downing when something like this happens (as you mentioned with the DEC scenario, I remember the Alpha’s I had and how I loved them)

Secondly, still a bit torn here on GPL’ing anything at this point to be honest. I am really not trying to be nostalgic here, but I remember when times were different and Open Source didnt just mean downloading something from the internet slapping it together with some glue code and following the latest paradigm because someone wrote a book on it; to be fair alot of this stuff is really cool and some really smart people have done great work (Lucene, Hadoop et all), but all too often this falls into the hands of some who have no experience in the industry who dont understand why a “best practice” exists and why NOT to do something that has not been done. Apologies if this sound like philosophy here but I still believe that I should still have an opinion even if it is more of a gripe. I am sure you have thrown me right into the GPL/OpenSource hater category, but just wait before you throw that stone. What I am trying to say here (badly) is that people often learn the wrong things from things like DEC’s troubled leadership.. sometimes we swing too far in one direction, DEC had some great products and ideas just as Apple does now does that mean that they are both alike in this way? probably not. DEC was never really about consumers, Apple REALLY is and I think we have to compare apples to apples (damn sorry, no pun intended.. really).

All too often people say “just GPL it and it will take off, will fix our troubles”; this has never been proven to work, that feedback is anecdotal at best.

I read somewhere that there’s been a lot of integration problems for ZFS because it wasn’t designed for certain cases that doesn’t happen in servers. Like sleep mode, low-battery, or anything involving committing a reasonable state extremely quickly and depending on the drives to make sure they really did write it. I’ve only used ZFS on FreeBSD and OpenSolaris, and I’m also wondering how they’d treat some of the pools/datasets in a consumer-friendly manner.

Is Oracle/Sun to remove all non-Sun code and just release that block under a GPL fork? Is Oracle to release the code under a different license, and then accept whatever liability flows from that decision?

As for whether intellectual property claims might be enough to prevent including an important project with a MacOS X release, I would recall the 10.0.0 release that shipped without OpenSSH, on the strength of concern that someone claimed trademark in the name of the ssh binary. This didn’t last, and Apple shipped OpenSSH in 10.0.1, but it was a noteworthy absence and caused me considerable concern because I couldn’t out of the box use the system for remote sessions.

I’ve written a bit on this here:
http://jadedconsumer.blogspot.com/2009/10/macos-on-zfs-and-licensing.html

My question is whether Apple’s concerns about IP issues (a) will dissipate with NetApp’s litigation, (b) will dissipate as Apple realizes that the indemnification terms apply only where Apple re-releases code under different licenses, or (c) will turn out not to be Apple’s real reason for deciding ZFS wasn’t a Snow Leopard feature. Presumably Apple was satisfied with the technical aspects of the release, or it’d not have touted ZFS as a major selling point of Snow Leopard in its prerelease web page. So, I suspect the real issue is political/legal and not technical (unless rewriting Finder to expose access to ZFS features constitutes a technical issue).

The freebsd port of ZFS has long made it known that zfs is resource hungry.
http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSKnownProblems
Granted this page is over a year old so things may have gotten better.

At least FreeBSD has has 64 bit kernels to work with for a while, which makes those silly 128bit file offsets a bit less painful.

So who knows maybe the Apple was struggling to bring their kernel into the 64bit world and bring zfs to acceptable performance / mem foot print levels at the same time?

It just seem improbable to me that the main reason for pulling ZFS was entirely related to licensing issues.

The “resource hungry tendencies” are zfs using resources as they are available. If you have a limited memory system, it is VERY easy to cap the amount dedicated to ZFS.

On the performance front, I can’t even begin to fathom what your issue is. I’m running it on a fileserver at home and it will max multiple gigE links 24/7 if I so choose.

Apple does not have the hardware?

Without at least two disks *inside* the same box, don’t use ZFS for a consumer device?

I’d like you to qualify those statements.

ALL of Apple’s current lineup is more than capable of running ZFS, and has been for seceral years.

As has been pointed out several times in these comments, there are advantages to running ZFS on single disk machines.

I think the main reason for it’s omission in 10.6, is the NetApp legal case. The CDDL doesn’t provide enough protection for Mr Jobs, which is a shame. I’m hoping that it makes an appearence once the case has been resolved. I’d like to enjoy the benefits I see at work, on my home machines….