Not sure what your point is. Are you saying Apple should use this? AFAICT it's still under the CDDL, which is the main reason Apple abandoned the ZFS plans in the first place.

Except for the fact DTrace is under the exact same license and ships with OS X.

Pulling DTrace out in the event of legal action, vs switching filesystems is a whole different beast.

DTrace is not a core technology on which the rest of the platform is built. If you read the actual article, this is discussed.

Agreed with all of this, but it's hard to imagine the licensing was truly insurmountable.

More or less everyone I've ever talked to or seen discuss it agrees (including several people in the comments on this blog post) -- Apple Legal felt ZFS was a no-go without patent indemnification from Sun/Oracle. Sun was willing, but Oracle said no as soon as they purchased.

At that point the word came down from Apple Legal to Engineering that it wasn't happening. And there's nothing more insurmountable than your own legal department.

"At that point the word came down from Apple Legal to Engineering that it wasn't happening. And there's nothing more insurmountable than your own legal department. "

Just to note: It doesn't really work this way, even at Apple.

It really means "legal was better at arguing their side than whoever argued against them to the SVP/CEO who made the decision"

While apple is worse than most (from talking to friends and counterparts), no company, even Apple, is so silly that the legal department can't be overruled (any general purpose software company that works like that goes bankrupt pretty quickly).

It just takes a really good business case for doing so, and none existed here.

That is,if it had been considered super-mission-critical, it just would have happened anyway, they would have taken the risk.

(I kind of just hate when these stories get portrayed as legal ruling with an iron fist with nobody having any say over them.)

Just scrub out some J's :p