Modest threadjacking:

Apple has announced they're very much killing ZFS development. Given that Oracle now "owns" both ZFS and BrtFS (and, yes, I know that "ownership" is a slippery subtopic here), I'm curious if anybody has any thoughts on when we might expect to get these sorts of "advanced" filesystem features supported out-of-the-box in Linux or OS X or whatever else.

I'm somewhat suspicious of OpenSolaris. Maybe I shouldn't be. I'm mostly just really pissed that I bought my Mac Pro, with the four hard drive bays inside, very explicitly because Apple had promised the availability of ZFS in 10.6, so I purchased the right sort of hardware to take advantage. Now I feel taken advantage of.

(I figured this was worthwhile enough to fork off the raid enclosure thread)

I was disappointed to see the news as well, but it's clear something legal was likely preventing ZFS from moving into OS X. Not sure if Oracle complicated the situation, or what happened. I also wonder if this will impact FreeBSD in any way, as they have had ZFS support for a while now.

Apple at this point will likely try to build something similar in house, adding yet another file system to the mix, unfortunately.

ZFS was in fact promised for 10.5 and was even featured prominently on its specs page with a complimentary graphic and all. It was quietly removed some point before 10.5 was released.

I can see an opening for a lawsuit against Apple here, since the advertising for 10.6 wasn't disclaimed as a forward-looking statement that may or may not come to fruition.

Being pissed at Apple aside, there's still a pending lawsuit against Sun and ZFS by NetApp: http://www.sun.com/lawsuit/zfs/

I'm sure Apple wasn't too pleased to be working on a technology facing possible litigation - which has been going on since September of 2007. This also appears to be Sun's fault as they provoked NetApp into filing this defensive lawsuit when they went after them seeking royalties for some of their own patents.

Meanwhile Apple is apparently working on its own next generation filesystem and currently even have one (or more?) outstanding job requisitions for a related position.

There would certainly be some irony if Apple was the subject of a class-action lawsuit as a consequence of action they took to avoid another lawsuit.

A lawsuit? Really? While I can't verify the server Snow Leopard page due to it not being in the archive, the client page had "All features on this page are subject to change." at the bottom. Even if that wasn't there, I really don't see a lawsuit going that far.

I wonder if the issue had anything to do with the GPL incompatibility with the CDDL license ZFS fell under. This is what keeps it out of Linux as well, at least at the kernel level.

I guess you have more faith in people that I do. A couple of years ago I read a list of all the pending lawsuits against Apple. If a ZFS lawsuit came about, it would probably be in the 98th percentile measuring the saneness and rationality of the suits. There are some really crazy ones filed each year.

You may be right that the older page also had similar sub-text to the one you linked. I can't say for certain. And ZFS is not the only thing I've seen go missing off their feature pages. Tiger lost some bits and Leopard lost something else as well which I can't recall right now. I do remember going back to the page to look and thinking - "WTF, I swear this page last said ...."