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Apple Discontinues ZFS Project
Zaurus writes "Apple has replaced its ZFS project page with a notice that 'The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly.' Apple originally touted ZFS as a feature that would be available in Snow Leopard Server. A few months before release, all mention of ZFS was removed from the Apple web site and literature, and ZFS was notably absent from Snow Leopard Server at launch. Despite repeated attempts to get clarification about their plans from ZFS, Apple has not made any official statement regarding the matter. A zfs-macos Google group has been set up for members of Apple's zfs-discuss mailing list to migrate to, as many people had started using the unfinished ZFS port already. The call is out for developers who can continue the forked project."
Daring Fireball suggests that Apple's decision could have been motivated by NetApp's patent lawsuit over ZFS.
Engineering a new filesystem is hard and expensive.
It's so hard, it often makes the developers murder their (ex) girlfriends and remove the seats of their cars.
... and then they built the supercollider.
If MS ever adopted ZFS, they'd change a bunch of things just to make it intentionally incompatible.
And the same would occur if ZFS ever went GPL i.e., RMS would fork it and introduce meaningless incompatibilities, as was done with make, pgp, sort, and numerous other utilities. It's the same reason Postifx, Apache, MPL, and ISC licenses were worded the way they are.
So let Apple develop their own ZFS-alike. It's unlikely to be adopted outside of Apple, and unlikely to influence any other filesystem's developer or end-user momentum.