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Apple Confirms No (Default) ZFS In Leopard
javipas writes "Despite recent rumors about the possible inclusion of ZFS as the filesystem of choice for MacOS X 10.5 'Leopard', an Apple executive has denied this possibility. Brian Croll, senior director of product marketing for the Mac OS has as much as said 'ZFS is not happening ... Croll declined to comment on statements made last week by Sun Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz, who said the use of ZFS would be announced at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Upon further questioning, Croll would only confirm that Apple had never said ZFS would be a part of Leopard. A representative with Sun did not have any immediate comment.' Users of the future operating system will have to keep working with HFS+, a filesystem that is almost ten years old now." Update: 06/12 19:57 GMT by KD : An Apple spokesman contacted InformationWeek with a correction, which they ran as a comment on their original story: What Apple meant to say was, "ZFS would be available as a limited option, but not as the default file system."
"Users of the future operating system will have to keep working with HFS+, a filesystem that is almost ten years old now."
Yes, because a file system is something that should definitely be re-designed every two years or so. You know, just to stay "current"...
The TFA says:
"Croll declined to comment on statements made last week by Sun Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz, who said the use of ZFS would be announced at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Upon further questioning, Croll would only confirm that Apple had never said ZFS would be a part of Leopard."
That reads like "would neither confirm nor deny to our reporter" to me, not "has denied".
Cheers,
Ian
It even goes so far as to allow 64-bit apps without a 32-bit binary to run in 32-bit mode transparently, which is unprecedented thus far.
Almost as unprecedented as a Mac zealot making hilariously inaccurate technical claims because they simply don't understand what they're talking about, but don't see that a justification for keeping their mouths shut.
Come October, Mac OS X will serve everyone with one price, one version, one install: one vision of simple 64-bit desktop goodness.
I made a deal with a hitman. If I ever fall in love with a company to that extent he's going to come round and shoot me in the face. I find it a more palatable option than allowing myself to become a PR spewing corporate cocksucker.
For the sake of argument, how would it have sounded different if Apple just had never planned on shipping ZFS as the defualt file system?
This really doesn't make any sense. Why would Apple have had tens of thousands of nVidia cards, something that otherwise they wouldn't be using, just sitting around?
If this is simply retaliatory and not a readiness issue, then Apple is seriously undermining its own products in favor of PR. The truth of the matter is that it doesn't much matter if Samsung coded solutions for Apple or someone else did it, and it didn't particularly matter if ATI made the video cards or Nvidia, these companies can be switched out rather interchangeably. However, ZFS is a giant step forward in file systems and has loads more features than anything else, ripping it out just because they "spilled the beans" would be babyish and hostile. Any logical mind would reason that this isn't an apples-to-apples comparison of retaliation as there's no similar vendor. It's most likely a readiness issue.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
Considering all the talk about how Apple retalliates against people who cross them, don't you think you out to abide by the Non-Disclosure Agreement you entered into when you received that Leopard build?
Probably from where there's "No child left behind".
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
Yeah, because Apple stock is so low compared to when he took charge.
I'm sure ATI wanted that contract, it was a nice contract, but Apple is NOTHING in the great scheme of the PC market.Let's see, Apple is about 5% of the graphics card market share. ATI has about 25% of the market right now, so they would represent a 20% increase in sales for ATI, hmmm, I think that might be worth a little bit of work to get the contract. Gee what do we have to do to manage such a contract... not violate our confidentiality agreement, that does sound pretty hard.
And there aren't that many major players in the high-end graphic chip game.There are enough so that Apple has a few choices.
Why play the prima donna, when he might have to deal with them in the future?If people violate your trust and undermine your market position, why would you keep doing business with them? If, at some point in the future Apple does do business with ATI again, do you think ATI will take keeping things confidential seriously or do you think they'll stupidly lose a giant contract while gaining nothing again? What about all of Apple's other suppliers for components? Do you think they will take confidentiality seriously? By punishing ATI, Apple showed they were serious and would not put up with that kind of stupidity. Now their statements to suppliers are credible instead of hot air.
I predicted this a week ago:
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My understanding is that Samsung did score the contract for the chip in the 2nd Gen Nano. Wikipedia says so, for whatever that's worth.
Additionally, I think people are getting crazy reactionary, assuming that the gaffe by SUN was responsible for ZFS not making Leopard.
There's no way to know if it was even in there before anyway.
And besides, Leopard was delayed by 6 months back in March. When you delay a product, you don't go adding new features to it, it'll just make the schedule longer. You might in fact defer features you were thinking of adding, like ZFS. It reduces the work to be done and helps shorten the schedule, keeping you closer to the original date.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
The five year history of Apple's share price indicates that Apple's strictly enforced policies regarding secrecy of their product plans is probably not hurting the company in any way. Considering the lackluster performance of other companies that blabber on and on and on about their half-baked plans that never mature, one might well conclude that this policy is helping Apple shareholders, even if it comes at the expense of occasional inconvenience.
That said, ZFS is probably not important enough for Apple to punish Sun over a set of flapping gums. If you want a better conspiracy theory, perhaps Apple was testing Sun to see if they could keep a secret. The answer is "No."
Really, though, everybody knows ZFS is interesting, and Apple is porting it to Mac OS X. It's quite likely that nobody at Apple knows when or if ZFS on Mac OS X will be mature enough to become a candidate for replacing the default filesystem. It probably won't happen before October, but that's not to say it will never happen.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Yeah, because Apple stock is so low compared to when he took charge.
Hubris often leads to poor decisions. An arrogant prick who is always right is a hero -- until he's wrong.
Jobs has done alot of great stuff -- he's a visionary who has beaten cancer and grown an amazing company at the same time. That doesn't mean that he's infallible. The obsession with secrecy costs Apple alot of business -- there are today enterprises that would purchase thousands of Macs, but the needless obsession with secrecy and refusal to listen to some customer desires hurts the company in the long run.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK