[josephg]

But the last word in zfs is oracle.

As I heard from an anonymous friend at Apple, macOS was weeks away from announcing an official transition to zfs and then oracle bought sun.

Presumably, as a courtesy Apple asked oracle to confirm it was free to use zfs (since it was published under a permissive license). Oracle demanded money anyway. Apple blinked - not wanting to get sued by oracle. And the rest is history. A couple years later Apple wrote their own proprietary zfs like filesystem called APFS that has many similar features. And that has, to my knowledge, not been opensourced.

(It does have very detailed documentation though. Holy cow - 180 pages. https://developer.apple.com/support/downloads/Apple-File-Sys... )

[lxgr]

I think it’s unrealistic to think that Microsoft or any embedded device vendor would have ever implemented ZFS, regardless of the patent situation.

macOS might have switched to something more modern a bit sooner than they did, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they hadn’t switched to APFS anyway after a while. Being able to independently drive your non-detachable-storage FS spec is a pretty big advantage as an OS vendor.

[josephg]

Well, according to my source, it would have actually happened if not for oracle. These decisions really come down to the people involved. I’m sure some people, given that choice, would never consider zfs. But some clearly would - and did.

Using an opensource filesystem like zfs doesn’t mean you aren’t in charge of your own destiny. Apple has skilled systems engineers. They could easily have made custom extensions and changes to zfs if they saw fit.