I'm really saddened that in today's world, good software dies a terrible death because of the technicalities of the legal system. Licensing is a double-edged sword that anybody that writes a single line of code must heed. Not only licensing but its stalwart companion, patenting. I cringe whenever I hear either of those two words because innovation is ultimately the victim of both's murderous appetite for control.

What I'm really talking about today is the latest blow to ZFS, Sun's elegant solution to some of the file system world's oldest problems. Apple has officially ended the years of flirtation it has had with the file system. And with this step, in one quick motion, Apple might have doomed ZFS to an early death by relegating it to what appears to be a dying operating system maintained by a company soon-to-be absorbed by a not-so-sleeping giant.

Sun wanted ZFS to be open and adopted by any other OS that saw the benefit in it. They open-sourced it and generally promoted the hell out of it as a feature of Solaris. Many an OS have tried, but only one has succeeded at including it, that being FreeBSD. The porting it appears is the easy part. The licensing/legality aspect is where everything falls apart. The Linux kernel maintainers refuse to add it because the CDDL license ZFS is released under is incompatible with the GPL. That all seemed to put the spotlight on that "other Unix" out there.

Apple was enthusiastic about ZFS because it seemed to mesh up well with the goals of their Time Machine back-up system. There was legitimate serious talk pre-Leopard that ZFS could be the default filesystem. The evidence was there, there was a read-only ZFS implementation in beta releases of Mac OS X Leopard. And that for the most part is how things have stagnated over the past few years, with an open source project dedicated to fully porting the ZFS to OS X and apparently having complete support inside Apple.

What really was the nail in the coffin? We may not know for a very long time. Likely, it was somewhere between licensing and the current software patent lawsuit between Sun and NetApp. Either way, its certain that it was a technical challenge or issue. It was all down to the paper work, where great ideas go to die. I'm not sad because ZFS didn't win the crown, only because it lost on a total technicality.