Ugh, for the life of me I never understood why Apple didn’t make Time Machine heavily integrated with ZFS right from the get go.
In those days it wasn’t Oracle, it was Sun. And I cannot imagine Apple not being able to negotiate licensing terms with Sun. Hell, Jonathan Schwartz had already worked with Steve Jobs before when Lighthouse was writing heaps of software for NeXT. I can’t imagine Schwartz and Sun not being willing to play.
In fact, back in those days Apple still was in the enterprise game with XServe hardware. Fellow NeXT / Apple aficionados and I remember one WWDC where we were suspecting a big Sun-Apple partnership announcement, possibly paving the way for a future Apple acquisition of Sun.
But then Oracle happened and burned everything that had been good about Sun to the ground. I have mostly given up my 1990s-born hatred of Microsoft and Bill Gates. It’ll be some time before I’d ever trust Oracle or Ellison.
I believe this has more to do with NetApp's patent claims and technical decisions than Oracle. (i.e. Apple announced to have stopped working before the Sun acquisition closed, before Oracle had any control)
I remember when APFS was introduced, it was framed as being for everything from the Apple Watch to the Mac Pro. Would ZFS have scaled down to whatever puny hardware is in the first-gen watch?
I imagine the main reason to use it would be that you have ONE filesystem that runs everything, everywhere. Though come to think of it, I feel like snapshots and relative ease of creating new filesystems in the pool could be handy for upgrades.
Zfs still has a huge overhead. It needs more ram than a watch or even phone is going to have - until they start packing enough that losing 4gigs of ram to overhead is fine.
I mean, ZFS has always been CDDL licensed, even before it was acquired by Oracle. If it once was native in OSX, then it was under the same licensing terms it is today, right?
I can't even imagine that Apple minded the CDDL, given that they still shipped DTrace.
The best theory I've ever heard about this was that it's much easier to rip out a debugging tool than in-place convert a filesystem if it turns out to be legally troublesome in some fashion.
