Well, the BSD port of ZFS has the reputation of being less reliable and difficult to administer due to lack of certain features and tool support, so possibly Apple ran into similar problems. The NetApp lawsuit can't help, either.
Really? I hadn't heard that. What are the problems (especially reliability ones) with ZFS outside Solaris? I always assumed it was more or less a straight port. ZFS doing its own RAID implies to me that it sits relatively tightly on top of a simple block device layer.
The NetApp issue, though, does seem plausible to me. At the very least, you'd want to see some level of indemnity from either NetApp or Oracle before shipping this on millions of devices.
For a while my FreeBSD 7 ZFS FS would be empty every time I rebooted -- as if it was reformatted in the boot scripts. That was a pretty big bummer and put me off of using it seriously for a few years. The Solaris ZFS bug was enough FUD for me to wrap it up entirely.
I haven't heard anything specific, so certainly take it with a grain of salt. I was considering using ZFS on my home backup server a while back but didn't want to deal with OpenSolaris, so I did some Googling to see if the BSD port was worth it. This was two or three years ago so I don't remember the specifics, but I decided it wasn't worth it and people griping about disappearing data, disappearing zpools, and stripes that acted like black holes.
