Fun fact: When Apple first built Time Machine, the goal was that ZFS would be the root filesystem. That's why the TM UX fits so nicely with ZFS. Sadly the licensing issues scared Apple off from adopting ZFS.
It was not licensing. ZFS is licensed the exact same way as Dtrace, and Dtrace is part of Mac OS / macOS.
It was signing a 'support' contract with Sun: terms couldn't be agreed to. From Jeff Bonwick (co-creator of ZFS) on the zfs-users list at the time:
> 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.
Then Oracle bought Sun, and thats when everything fell apart. Presumably Apple deemed it too much of a legal risk to use zfs even with the CDDL, because of how litigious Oracle is.
Kind of surprising given how close Ellison and Jobs were: Steve was the 'official' photographer at Larry's wedding.
* https://petapixel.com/2010/10/08/steve-jobs-the-wedding-phot...
Considering that Apple would be rolling it out to many users through high margin computers this is a reasonable concern.
I hear you about a ZFS root partition, though
If you're going to put a third-party's technology into your products (i.e., the file system that everything is built on), having extra assurances with regards to support and development is not crazy.
Apple tends to buy companies that make the technology they based their products on, but wasn't really going to happen with Sun. At best they'd have to poach the entire ZFS team, but there could still be things like patents and such (which they're allowed to use via the CDDL).
Yes, they incorporated Dtrace, but that wouldn't be a big deal to rip out if things went sideways legally-speaking.
Changing and depending on a file system is a BFD.
The sad thing is that they didn’t open-source APFS. They could have done that at 0 cost and scored a lot of awesomeness points.
I've used APFS on my Mac, and it worked well enough that I didn't have to think about. Now I've been using ZFS on my daily driver Linux PC and I don't have to think about it either.
I actually prefer ZFS for being able to set up transparent compression. But other than that, I'd be hard-pressed to pick a favorite.
if only ZFS hadn't fallen through! Speaking of which, are there any public plans to do this with APFS or are they just trying to push everyone into the cloud?
One interesting fact about the entire presentation of all the new features is that all of the backup Macs but one had crashed by the end. If you watch closely you can see the mirrored demo machines switching in when the live demo box locks up. Whee!
That unfortunately happened in the good timeline where Scheme in the browser also happened.
> That unfortunately happened in the good timeline where Scheme in the browser also happened.
Oh man that would be amazing. It would be so much better than javascript!
Re Scheme: It was the first choice of Javascript’s inventor, Brenden Eich, but the suits didn’t go for it. If you want to have a good cry, look up DSSSL and imagine the alternate timeline with S-expressions instead of HTML, DSSSL instead of CSS, and Scheme instead of Javascript.
Pretty sure there’s also a robust open source OpenStep or NeWS ecosystem instead of X11, Al Gore was a two termer, and 9/11 never happened.
I always thought that was a petty reason but I didn't really consider it beyond Steve Jobs to do that to be honest. He really took such matters very personally.
But your explanation sounds more reasonable. I really thought this until now though.
* https://web.archive.org/web/20121221111757/http://mail.opens...