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Comment by jbverschoor | Hacker News Reader

Licensing. Similarly, otherwise it would've been included in macOS a long time ago (as the default fs according to some..)

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The reason it didn’t end up in macOS is because NetApp sued Sun for patent infringement. Apple wanted nothing to do with that lawsuit and quickly abandoned the project.

As others have stated, dtrace has the exact same license and has been in MacOS for years.

The licensing is nothing to do with it on OSX - indeed DTrace (also under the CDDL) has been shipping in it for years.

And it's arguably even a bigger issue on Linux distros.

It’s a moderate pain on Linux and then only really that if you’re running on something bleeding-edge like Arch. Otherwise it’s just a kernel module like any other.

But it doesn't ship with either Red Hat or SUSE distros, which is an issue for supported commercial use.

Whats Oracle's play here, do they somehow make money out of ZFS which makes them reluctant to re-license it?

Is there a CLA for OpenZFS/ZoL? I don't believe there is, so I don't think Oracle can unilaterally relicense it.

Even if there were a CLA for OpenZFS, it wouldn't affect Oracle's inability to relicense the whole thing.

They could relicense their codebase, of course, but the number of changes that have happened since they diverged is not small.

A CLA and copyright assignment was how Oracle were able to make (now Oracle) ZFS proprietary again in the first place. As you say though, OpenZFS and Oracle ZFS have diverged quite a bit, and most of the world is now based around the OpenZFS variant that acts as the upstream for Linux, FreeBSD and even Windows variants.

I do believe that the license was fine for macOS but when Oracle bought Sun that killed it cold.

Jobs never liked anybody other than himself holding all the cards. Having Ellison and Oracle holding the keys to ZFS was just never going to fly.

It's a combination of the license and the fact that it's Oracle, of all entities, that owns the copyright. Perhaps either one by itself wouldn't be a dealbreaker but the combination is. And, of course, Oracle could have changed the license at any time after buying Sun.

(Of course, Jobs may have just decided he didn't want to depend on someone else for the MacOS filesystem in any case.)

ADDED: And as others noted, there were also some storage patent-related issues with Sun. So just a lot of potential complications.

I had ZFS on a Mac from Apple for a short amount of time during one of the betas :( I think TimeMachine was going to be based on it but they pulled out.

FYI there is a third-party effort for making OpenZFS usable on macOS.

https://openzfsonosx.org/

I used it for a while but unfortunately since they are not many people working on this and they are not working on it full time it can take them a good while from a new version of macOS is released until OpenZFS is usable with that version of macOS. This was certainly the case a while ago and why I stopped using OpenZFS on macOS and went back to only using ZFS on FreeBSD and Linux instead of additionally using it on macOS. So with my Mac computers I only use APFS.

Jobs and Ellison were really close friends

And also cold hearted clear eyed businessmen unlikely to allow friendship to affect their corporations.

I’d love to be a fly on the wall for some of those conversations.

That makes absolutely no sense. Jobs and Ellison were best friends. Oracle acquiring Sun would have made it MORE attractive, not less.

https://www.cnet.com/news/larry-ellison-talks-about-his-best...

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