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____/ Homer on Friday 23 Oct 2009 23:36 : \____
> [quote]
> Apple shuts down ZFS open source project
>
> By Daniel Eran Dilger
>
> Apple's efforts to support the development of ZFS, an advanced file
> system originally created by Sun, were officially terminated today in a
> notice posted by MacOS Forge.
>
> The tersely worded message only stated that "The ZFS project has been
> discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly."
>
> ...
>
> Sun's ZFS had already come under fire for patent infringement from
> NetApp as part of a patent war instigated by Sun.
>
> NetApp reported that ZFS not only infringes its WAFL storage patents,
> but that Sun intentionally designed ZFS to provide features unique to
> NetApp's WAFL, which Sun itself described it its marketing as "the first
> commercial file system to use the copy-on-write tree of blocks approach
> to file system consistency."
>
> This leaves Apple with an unfinished, patent-encumbered file system and
> without an enterprise class partner to work with in developing the
> future of ZFS. Were Apple to develop ZFS on its own, the technology
> would likely be relegated to pariah status by the rest of the industry.
>
> It remains to be seen whether Apple will begin working with Oracle to
> port the similar BTRFS to Mac OS X, or simply continue to add new
> features to HFS+ while monitoring the landscape for promising new file
> system options. In any case, ZFS appears to be very dead.
> [/quote]
>
> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/10/23/apple_shuts_down_zfs_open_source_project.html
>
>
> Related:
>
> [quote]
> Alan Cox [interview] suggested, "the real test of whether Sun were
> serious about ZFS being anywhere but Solaris is what they do to license
> it - they've patented everything they can, and made the code available
> only under licenses incompatible with other OS products. Their intent is
> quite clear, and quite sad. Compare it to what the old Sun company did
> with NFS, which is now a standard used everywhere." Theodore T'so added,
> "given that Sun has reportedly filed a huge number of patents covering
> ZFS and has refused to make them available for anything other than
> Solaris --- and there are senior Sun programmers who have on record
> stated that one of the reasons why Sun picked the CDDL was precisely
> because it was incompatible with GPL and Sun fears Linux
> [/quote]
>
> http://kerneltrap.org/node/8066
Since Oracle has btrfs (and soon zfs too on he face of it), the
licensing problem of zfs could be fixed. Oracle would not just throw away
this Sun project, which is probably a lot more mature than btrfs.
- --
~~ Best of wishes
Yes, but they forgot to put in the essential checkbox:
I am not a brain-damaged lemur on crack. -- Mark Hughes
http://Schestowitz.com | GNU is Not UNIX | PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
roy pts/0 :0 Sat Oct 24 01:17 still logged in
http://iuron.com - proposing a non-profit search engine
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