Comment by astrange
5 years ago
Nvidia is difficult to work with because they're as prideful (or more) as Apple. ZFS is hard to license commercially because it means having to negotiate with Oracle, who are evil.
Well, and there were those desoldering GPUs.
At the time it meant working with Sun not Oracle. Further, it didn’t need licensing - DTrace, under the same CDDL license - ships with macOS to this day.
Even further than that, Sun owned ZFS and was not bound to the license they gave to everyone else. If Apple demanded that ZFS on Mac OS X were a proprietary component, Sun might've actually gone with it.
Sun had, by then, mostly given up on the workstation market. They had everything to gain from making Unix mainstream, even if it was OSX instead of Solaris, and pretty much nothing to lose.
FWIW the beta-quality implementation of ZFS in macOS was removed only after Oracle bought Sun.
Though that doesn't explain how DTrace survived.
Also Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were known to be best buddies.
> Though that doesn't explain how DTrace survived.
I think Larry Ellison discovered, much to his dissatisfaction, open source products and their forks, are incredibly hard to kill.
I'd love to have seen his face when he realized that he wouldn't be able to kill MySQL.
I had a laptop with one of those GPUs. Apple replaced the motherboard. With the same exact thing. It's like if your defective Takata air bag was replaced with... a defective Takata air bag.
Yeah Nvidia is a pain in the ass. But they weren’t banned from Apple platforms for that, as I understand it.