Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 23rd Oct 2009 21:13 UTC, submitted by poundsmack
John Siracusa, the Mac OS X guru who writes those insanely detailed and well-written Mac OS X reviews for Ars Technica, once told a story about the evolution of the HFS+ file system in Mac OS X - he said it was a struggle between the Mac guys who wanted the features found in BeOS' BFS, and the NEXT guys who didn't really like these features. In the end, the Mac guys won, and over the course of six years, Mac OS X reached feature parity - and a little more - with the BeOS (at the FS level).
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Member since:
2005-07-06
I don't buy that at all. It's a reason given on a mailing list where people are frantically running around for an answer other than "Apple couldn't integrate ZFS into OS X properly and felt it was the wrong solution in the long-run that might well create more work." While reading and writing to ZFS on OS X has approached something like production quality, using it as your own true filesystem is something else. Performance issues need to be analysed and corrected (ZFS is doing a lot of things that have never been seen in widespread desktop filesystems) as well as doing far deeper integration with the operating system. HFS(+) has been bludgeoned into doing that over many years.
Apple has integrated many software components under a variety of open source licenses and never had problems before. They might have wanted Sun to give them a special license or come to some kind of support agreement, but that really shouldn't have been any trouble at all for Sun. The relationship would have been extremely beneficial to both Sun and Apple considering the workload that could have been shared, especially considering Sun's takeover by Oracle and Apple's historically bare filesystem development resources.