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Comment by throw0101a

5 days ago

> ZFS on OS X was killed because of Oracle licensing drama.

It was killed because Apple and Sun couldn't agree on a 'support contract'. From Jeff Bonwick, one of the co-creators ZFS:

>> Apple can currently just take the ZFS CDDL code and incorporate it (like they did with DTrace), but it may be that they wanted a "private license" from Sun (with appropriate technical support and indemnification), and the two entities couldn't come to mutually agreeable terms.

> I cannot disclose details, but that is the essence of it.

* https://archive.is/http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs...

Sun took DTrace, licensed via CDDL—just like ZFS—and put it into the kernel without issue. Of course a file system is much more central to an operating system, so they wanted much more of a CYA for that.