> Furthermore, while the OSX port effort was stopped (apparently due to legal/licensing concerns)
I'm not so sure about this. Apple's recent actions seem to point to them wanting to control as much of the shipping code in their OS as possible. An external dependency on ZFS (especially where it may be deprecated by Sun at some point, forcing them to maintain it) could be a bad thing for them in the long run, vs. a modern filesystem that they've built themselves from the ground up, to their own needs.
ZFS is a far superior filesystem to anything Apple has now (at least, in public), and they obviously had it ported already (even including read/write support for Leopard that you could download from their website). On top of that, ZFS is open-source and there are no license restrictions on filesystem modules in OS X (vs. Linux's GPL restrictions).
In the end, I think they just wanted to own everything, top to bottom, and go in the direction that suited them best.
> I'm not so sure about this. Apple's recent actions seem to point to them wanting to control as much of the shipping code in their OS as possible
If the project is under a license they can use (MIT, BSD, something like that) they do have that control, even if they're not project leads.
> On top of that, ZFS is open-source and there are no license restrictions on filesystem modules in OS X
There is one thing Apple likes even less than not having control over their OS, and it's patent risks. http://blogs.netapp.com/dave/2007/09/netapp-sues-sun.html (and Sun not offering any guarantee against patent issues as far as I know) is why they dropped ZFS originally.
I'm not so sure about this. Apple's recent actions seem to point to them wanting to control as much of the shipping code in their OS as possible. An external dependency on ZFS (especially where it may be deprecated by Sun at some point, forcing them to maintain it) could be a bad thing for them in the long run, vs. a modern filesystem that they've built themselves from the ground up, to their own needs.
ZFS is a far superior filesystem to anything Apple has now (at least, in public), and they obviously had it ported already (even including read/write support for Leopard that you could download from their website). On top of that, ZFS is open-source and there are no license restrictions on filesystem modules in OS X (vs. Linux's GPL restrictions).
In the end, I think they just wanted to own everything, top to bottom, and go in the direction that suited them best.