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As you may know, RedHat has deprecated BTRFS in RHEL7.4 whereas many distributions like Ubuntu fully support ZFS.

I woud say that the status of BTRFS is worse than that of OpenZFS on Linux. See also here for an interesting article.

Nobody outside of Apple really knows what the fusion drive mechanism does because Apple does not open-source the technology. What you wrote is basically straight from Apple's marketing department. We know that they are very good, this does not mean the technology is that great. Early reports were saying that the tech was basically on par with SSHD (a HDD + some amount of Flash as cache) or a bit better, but not a game changer.

The closest open-source equivalent would be the ZFS filesystem, which offers several levels of caching with its ZIL and L2ARC features. These do offer very good performance improvements.

"Complete freedom" is a great theory but people need to eat and when a company has to release all source code with a binary they're probably less likely to put time into that source code.

iXSystems picked up FreeNAS development and contributes to it as well as FreeBSD, but they don't have to release their secret bits on their sold products. Apple and Juniper are also contribute code because they can keep the parts they want to secret.

CUPS is the backend to OS X's printing and as soon as Apple picked it and hired the developer the UI actually started to become usable. I'm sure half of their code isn't released but Linux still gets to benefit from the parts that are. We also aren't reading about how Michael Sweet is 'scraping by' and the dire state of Linux printing.

Actually the fellows who work on PC-BSD, or most of them, work for a company called iX Systems that provides servers and storage.

I like having smaller NAS boxes at home, but I'd really like the option of ZFS too. Most of the mini-systems I've looked at aim strictly at Linux, and the official FreeNAS Mini is overkill--$995 diskless, partly because it has 16GB of ECC RAM. Any suggestions for a small, 2 disk setup that will run FreeNAS at closer to $500?

As an alternative to Synology, how about FreeNAS running on an ITX platform:

http://www.ixsystems.com/stora...

Because the software is better supported via the FreeNAS community?

The thermometer is updated manually, because some donations come via bank transfers, some via cheques, some via PayPal and some via DonateNow and automating all of those is a bit tricky. Currently, Deb goes through all of the donations by hand and updates the donors list and the title. Over the last two days, she's been completely swamped with the number of donations. The amount isn't totally unprecedented, but the number of individual donations is even larger than a few years ago when the Foundation put out the call for individual donors because they were in danger of losing their non-profit status because too much of their funding came from large corporate donations.

Also, while I certainly wouldn't discourage anyone from donation to the FreeBSD Foundation, much of the work on FreeNAS (and PC-BSD) is funded by iX Systems, so if you use either of these projects and are in a position to put any business their way, it would possibly have a larger impact. iX is on the donors' page as a gold sponsor, but that doesn't tell the whole story. As well as making a sizeable donation to the Foundation directly, they have matched funding on a couple of Foundation-sponsored projects this year, so the total amount that they've given is considerably more (not to mention employing several people to work full-time on FreeBSD).

iXsystems. Juniper Networks. Apple

I'm willing to bet that all three have some proprietary stuff that they're not feeding back. It doesn't mean that they completely ignore the community. Apple owns CUPS now. iXsystems picked up FreeNAS development.

GPLv3 wouldn't probably make it anywhere into these companies.

I cannot find an actual server (with redundant power supplies, hotswap drive bays, monitoring hardware) that has a lot of drive bays, but less than 4 CPUs, because the $CPU ones are extremely expensive and I don't need 4 CPUs anyway. The only affordable ones have 4-6 bays max.

I bought this 4U system. If memory serves me right (too lazy to check), it accomodates two power supplies. I opted for just one. The chassis, I think, is this Supermicro chassis. It has 8 hot swap drive bays (plus 2 peripheral).

Is that what you're looking for?

ZFS in FreeBSD 9 has deduplication support. I've been running the betas / release candidates on my NAS for a little while (everything important is backed up, so I thought I'd give it a test). ZFS development in FreeBSD is funded by iXSystems, who sell expensive NAS and SAN systems so they have an incentive to keep it improving.

I have a ZFS filesystem using compression and deduplication for my backups from my Mac laptop. I copy entire files to it, but it only stores the differences.

I'd love to use ZFS but a) I'd have to work with Oracle

Or you can use FreeBSD, which has supported L2ARC since 7.4. The point of something like ZFS is that it allows you to use commodity hardware, but iX Systems will happily sell you FreeBSD-based ZFS storage up to 540TB. They fund most of the development of FreeNAS and use it as the basis for their storage systems.

There are derivative desktop distros based on *bsd, like pc-bsd (see here http://www.pcbsd.org/ and here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-BSD). There's also a corporation based around providing enterprise support for pc-bsd, http://www.ixsystems.com/.

I'm in a business where we welcome GPL-licensed apps with open arms. Of course, we don't sell software, we sell services and expertise.

Well, many people sell service and expertise and they use non-GPL products. For instance, the URLs below will take to people who sell services and expertise in *BSD systems.

http://www.freebsd.org/commercial/consult.html
http://www.openbsd.org/support.html
http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/consultants.html
http://www.ixsystems.com/