[bsder]

I do believe that the license was fine for macOS but when Oracle bought Sun that killed it cold.

Jobs never liked anybody other than himself holding all the cards. Having Ellison and Oracle holding the keys to ZFS was just never going to fly.

[ghaff]

It's a combination of the license and the fact that it's Oracle, of all entities, that owns the copyright. Perhaps either one by itself wouldn't be a dealbreaker but the combination is. And, of course, Oracle could have changed the license at any time after buying Sun.

(Of course, Jobs may have just decided he didn't want to depend on someone else for the MacOS filesystem in any case.)

ADDED: And as others noted, there were also some storage patent-related issues with Sun. So just a lot of potential complications.

[tw04]

That makes absolutely no sense. Jobs and Ellison were best friends. Oracle acquiring Sun would have made it MORE attractive, not less.

https://www.cnet.com/news/larry-ellison-talks-about-his-best...

[spullara]

I had ZFS on a Mac from Apple for a short amount of time during one of the betas :( I think TimeMachine was going to be based on it but they pulled out.

[codetrotter]

FYI there is a third-party effort for making OpenZFS usable on macOS.

https://openzfsonosx.org/

I used it for a while but unfortunately since they are not many people working on this and they are not working on it full time it can take them a good while from a new version of macOS is released until OpenZFS is usable with that version of macOS. This was certainly the case a while ago and why I stopped using OpenZFS on macOS and went back to only using ZFS on FreeBSD and Linux instead of additionally using it on macOS. So with my Mac computers I only use APFS.

[qaq]

Jobs and Ellison were really close friends

[jamiek88]

And also cold hearted clear eyed businessmen unlikely to allow friendship to affect their corporations.

I’d love to be a fly on the wall for some of those conversations.