I thought btrfs was going nowhere for a while because it seemed way behind zfs for a long time.
But now it looks like it's catching up, and has some nice userspace tools, and some features that I don't even think zfs has (like the option to do overwrite-in-place, but you give up checksums/compression).
The user tools seem worse than zfs, but it does look like btrfs will be a leading filesystem soon.
I wouldn't say soon. Btrfs needs much more robust userspace tools. At the moment, the tools tell you nothing, and recovery is basically impossible. I have lost data several times now. While I had backups since I was using btrfs, I didn't expect to lose data the way that I did. The drive filled up with metadata, and since it didn't have anywhere to rebalance the metadata it couldn't move it, and even if I deleted files it wouldn't make a difference. It happened to me on two occasions. The interesting thing is that btrfs filesystem df showed I only had 80gb total, with a 120gb drive. Decided to go back to xfs for that drive, and I use zfs for my raidz2 array.
They absolutely can ship it. They choose not to. There is a big difference.
It's what happens when ideology is allowed to trump technology, and it is sad.
The fact that various distros ship not-open video card drivers shows that for some things, there's a willingness to compromise. This is far "worse" than shipping an open source module, or open source code that is compiled into a module on install, either of which could be done for ZFS.
The non-free drivers are allowed to be redistributed by the copyright holders. The reason to not distribute them would be ideological.
Linux and ZFS's licenses are incompatible, which would make it illegal to distribute them together. Both ZFS and Linux copyright owners could choose to sue any entity that would distribute Linux with ZFS support.
You take quite a logical leap from "licenses are incompatible" to "illegal to distribute them together." I'd love to know what led you to that conclusion.
As I said to the other poster, you're just spreading FUD.
Please provide reasoning why you think it's "illegal." Otherwise, you're just spreading FUD, which is the whole reason for people believing a Linux distribution can't ship ZFS on Linux in the first place.
Apart from that, e.g. each time you update your kernel you would have to recompile the modules for that specific kernel. ZFS is also an FS and i wouldn’t want to play jeopardy every time i do an update.
You depend on people outside your distribution to keep up, otherwise it might break when you upgrade your kernel. It's also basically in a perpetual beta.
But now it looks like it's catching up, and has some nice userspace tools, and some features that I don't even think zfs has (like the option to do overwrite-in-place, but you give up checksums/compression).
The user tools seem worse than zfs, but it does look like btrfs will be a leading filesystem soon.