Apple’s official project to port ZFS to Mac OS X has been canned:

The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly.

The writing’s been on the wall for this ever since 10.6 shipped with less support for ZFS than 10.5. There was unofficial “kinda sorta works” support for ZFS in 10.5, but none in 10.6.

Word on the street in Cupertino is that dropping ZFS wasn’t an engineering decision, but a legal one, and it might have had something to do with Oracle’s acquisition of Sun. I don’t know if it was a problem with the terms of the CDDL license, general distrust/dislike for Oracle, or what — only that the word came down from legal that ZFS was a no-go. Update: Perhaps it was the NetApp patent lawsuit against ZFS.

The flip side is that I’ve heard that Apple’s file systems team is full steam ahead on their own next-generation file system. And, perhaps not coincidentally, they’re hiring.

★ Friday, 23 October 2009