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Licensing Issues at Heart of Apple's Decision to Kill Snow Leopard ZFS Plans
Apple Kills ZFS Plans for Snow Leopard
Why Did Apple Drop ZFS From Snow Leopard?
Samsung Working With Developers To Optimize Solid State Drive Performance In Operating Systems
Snow Leopard Putting OS X On a Diet, Applications to Shrink Dramatically
Mac OS X Snow Leopard for Servers Getting ZFS
Speculation Smashed: No ZFS in Leopard
ZFS Now Default File System in Apple's OS X Leopard

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jinushaun
10/25/09

In reply to Licensing Issues at Heart of Apple's Decision to Kill Snow Leopard ZFS Plans
From what I've heard, Apple dropped ZFS because Sun couldn't guarantee support of it (the "private license" part), now that it has been bought by Oracle. A file system is way too important to leave to another company to decide your fate. Apple wanted to guarantee it was protected if it decided to completely invest in ZFS. #leopard
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JacquesAss
10/25/09

In reply to Licensing Issues at Heart of Apple's Decision to Kill Snow Leopard ZFS Plans
1. Sun is currently in the middle of litigation with NetApp over ZFS (hence the "indemnification" issues).
2. Sun is soon to be owned by Oracle, which is in the midst of developing BTRFS - an open source file-system with many of ZFS's strengths and lacking a few of the weaknesses. Some feel BTRFS will be the default LINUX file system before too long.
3. BTRFS is not yet finished - which means it's not yet ready for a commercial OS, but also leaves room for tweaking and adding before it is "final".
4. Apple wants a modern file system now, but will _need_ a modern file system soon.
5. Jobs and Ellison are friends.

I'm guessing that Apple has abandoned ZFS for BTRFS, saving them a potential lawsuit (if NetApp wins or settles) and allowing them to increase their interoperability with future *nix distros. We'll know for sure if Apple employees start popping up on the BTRFS mailing lists... #leopard
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PhilomenaAjax
10/25/09

In reply to Licensing Issues at Heart of Apple's Decision to Kill Snow Leopard ZFS Plans
As much as it pains me to defend Apple here, a lack of willingness to share wasn't the issue. From the cited mailing list Apple wanted a license "with appropriate technical support and indemnification". Technical support and indemnification are required for something as important as a filesystem. I have to give credit to Apple's legal counsel or whomever for making that call.
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robdaemon
10/25/09

In reply to Licensing Issues at Heart of Apple's Decision to Kill Snow Leopard ZFS Plans
I take this to mean that Apple simply doesn't want to release parts of any proprietary interfaces between Mac OS X and ZFS back to the community.

Not very open source friendly, but well within their realm of legal rights.
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Monty
10/25/09

In reply to Licensing Issues at Heart of Apple's Decision to Kill Snow Leopard ZFS Plans
If true, knowing that ZFS is supposedly an outstanding file system, could we interpret Apple's need for a "private license" as being bad for us consumers, or does this ultimately not matter? I am not certain how I feel about this information, if it is true. #leopard
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COCOViper
10/24/09

In reply to Apple Kills ZFS Plans for Snow Leopard
Snow Leopard is really shaping up to be Apple's Vista- i.e. the OS that really isn't that bad but should have been a lot more. #zfs
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PotteryBarnClearanceSale
10/24/09

@COCOViper: Wasn't Vista unusable? Rejected by most people? Who is saying that about Snow Leopard? #zfs
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exoren22
10/24/09

@PotteryBarnClearanceSale: Vista was NOT unusable. It was unusable if you had Nvidia. #zfs
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masshuum
10/24/09

@exoren22: what?... #zfs
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Nathan Obbards
10/24/09

@masshuum: nVidia caused a lot of blue screens because they couldn't code drivers for Vista. A majority of the problems Vista faced were the result of bad drivers by hardware manufacturers. After it had been out for about a year, hardware manufacturers finally learned how to code drivers for it and MS released SP1 which fixed almost all of the problems endemic to Vista. #zfs
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jepzilla
10/24/09

@Nathan Obbards: What's ironic is that nVidia's early drivers for Vista were pretty poor, but they actually got worse in the months after the release. At the start they'd just driver crash (Vista recovers from normal driver crashes with a screen flicker and a warning message). They didn't start BSODing until a few months after release. #zfs
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renderizer
10/24/09

In reply to Apple Kills ZFS Plans for Snow Leopard
right after their ad of broken promises...
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jinushaun
09/01/09

In reply to Why Did Apple Drop ZFS From Snow Leopard?
Snow Leopard is starting to sound more and more like Vista everyday! Are we ever going to get WinFS?
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t3knomanser
09/01/09

@jinushaun: The key difference being that ZFS was never a flagship item. The only people who care are people who run data centers- ZFS is waaaaaay too much file-system for your average user.
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oldtaku
08/31/09

In reply to Why Did Apple Drop ZFS From Snow Leopard?
As an engineer I'm going to guess that

1) They underestimated the work getting it fully integrated; not just 'there if you know how to get to it', but fully productized and easy enough for their audience to use. And taking into account all the new failure and configuration paths.

2) It's not really something blingy that they can explain to most of their customer base. How many people are using their MacBook or iMac and going 'dang, this file system is really just adequate' and tossing the OS in disgust?

3) So they just never had enough manpower to dedicate to it full time when they could have those people working on something else like MMS in the iPhone or the iTablet or a thousand other things. The best people for this job would have been the ones who were desperately trying to get 10.6 out and had their hands full of other stuff like the Finder rewrite.
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brobot - Beboptimus Prime
08/31/09

@oldtaku: you make some really good points. the only thing that I thought I'd add is that the target customer base for Mac OS X Server is going to typically be a much more 'technologically literate' group of people than the average Mac customer... meaning that ZFS isn't necessarily something that Apple would really need to advertise as a 'blingy' feature. Then again... it IS Apple after all...
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ludwigk
09/01/09

@oldtaku: I don't buy argument #2, considering that it was announced as part of Snow Leopard Server. The Server product is not about "blingy" features, and NONE of it is described to most of their customer base. People using MacBooks and iMacs typically wouldn't be using X Server anyway.

Argument #3 doesn't quite make sense, since Apple keeps their project teams so discrete.
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Sir Gibler
08/31/09

In reply to Why Did Apple Drop ZFS From Snow Leopard?
has anyone else notice that the interface was updated in iTunes when you run snow leopard. the scroll bar when view apps is well different. at least from my knowledge. EDIT: sorry if that was out of the blue, i just saw the comment below and i was thinking about the UI
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Edited by Sir Gibler at 08/31/09 10:49 PM Sir Gibler was starred Sir Gibler was unstarred

Bodie1550
08/31/09

In reply to Why Did Apple Drop ZFS From Snow Leopard?
Wasn't there also something called a "Marble Interface"? Perhaps in the Blizzard edition. Still -- looking forward to Snow Leopard which I should receive from Amazon by Friday of this week. Rumors be damned. This is the real thing. Thanks Apple!
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Sir Gibler
08/31/09

@Bodie1550: marble only appears in quicktime x and was more of a philosophy than an interface. (everything disappears unless you need it)
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zacbowling
08/31/09

In reply to Why Did Apple Drop ZFS From Snow Leopard?
DTrace isn't an issue with CDDL because its a userspace application and not linked to the kernel.

Apple wouldn't have to worry so much about GPL since still owns the Darwin kernel and can license it under whatever it wants.

Also it can just write the file system support as a kmod and not link it in directly (just means you can't boot from ZFS file system).
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Rosa Golijan promoted this comment Edited by zacbowling at 08/31/09 10:43 PM zacbowling was starred zacbowling was unstarred

ploopsy
08/31/09

In reply to Why Did Apple Drop ZFS From Snow Leopard?
Most computers that apple sells can only hold 1 hard drive. ZFS seems more use full in a multi disk file server or data center.
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Rosa Golijan promoted this comment ploopsy was starred ploopsy was unstarred

theRealMikeyG
08/31/09

@ploopsy: apparently you missed the first sentance....

----------------------------------------...">----------------------------------------...
In 2008, Apple announced that we would see ZFS as part of Snow Leopard Server, but a year later our copies are shipping with ZFS nowhere to be found.
----------------------------------------...">----------------------------------------...

see that part about Snow Leopard SERVER........
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Rosa Golijan promoted this comment Edited by Rosa Golijan at 08/31/09 10:39 PM theRealMikeyG was starred theRealMikeyG was unstarred

dallasmay
08/31/09

@ploopsy: Hey, in 30 years when we have exabyte hard drives you're going to regret that statement.
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ploopsy
08/31/09

@theRealMikeyG: OOPS! my bad! The orange writing cause "Disharmony" and I was unable to read it properly lol.

Actually It slipped my mind by the time I got to the end of it.
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ploopsy
08/31/09

@dallasmay: In 30 years a 4exabyte thumb drive will cost 8$.
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ndonahue
08/31/09

In reply to Why Did Apple Drop ZFS From Snow Leopard?
I think Apple just didn't want to go above the $29 price point. Imagine how many people wouldn't upgrade if the price was $29.95.
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zacbowling
08/31/09

In reply to Why Did Apple Drop ZFS From Snow Leopard?
did you nod off durning writing this?

"ZFS" became "ZDF" half way through.
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Rosa Golijan
08/31/09

@zacbowling: It's quite possible that I was sleep-writing while dreaming about Zacbowling da Fantastic.

Thanks for the catch, fixed.
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Edited by Rosa Golijan at 08/31/09 10:37 PM Rosa Golijan was starred Rosa Golijan was unstarred

zacbowling
08/31/09

@Rosa Golijan: hehe :-) my heart is warmed at the thought.
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