Farewell ZFS blog entry

[Alex Blewitt]

I wrote up about the demise of ZFS. Although I suspect the lawsuit
issue might be related, that (and the merger) was public knowledge
before ZFS was pulled. I suspect that it might have purely been a
stability issue, although why there wasn't any further development in
the future is an interesting one. I hope those that were responsible
for bringing ZFS to the Apple platform (and thanks again, by the way,
if you read this) are still gainfully employed and the opening for the
Mac filesystem post isn't related to ZFS' demise ...

http://alblue.blogspot.com/2009/10/apple-finally-kill-off-zfs.html

[toby]

On Oct 23, 6:39 pm, Alex Blewitt <alex.blew...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I wrote up about the demise of ZFS. Although I suspect the lawsuit  
> issue might be related, that (and the merger) was public knowledge  
> before ZFS was pulled. I suspect that it might have purely been a  
> stability issue, although why there wasn't any further development in  
> the future is an interesting one.

I have a hunch it was an issue of control - NIH Syndrome. Just
guessing Apple didn't feel they had enough control over ZFS and its
development. What sucks worse than taking heat for bugs in your own
software - is taking heat for bugs in someone else's; and a
filesystem is one of the most fundamental parts of the system.

One could counter-argue that other fundamental parts of OS X
originated outside Apple, but I would remit that by the time Apple
released them, after already having lived and become intimate with
them over some years as NEXTSTEP, the risks were judged relatively
low. Besides, it's not really feasible to start over with UNIX kernel
and userland, while a filesystem is just a weekend project, right
Dominic? :-)