Apple won't be broadly shipping ZFS, which they made pretty clear when they pulled it from Snow Leopard.
They haven't made an official statement, but the general consensus is that they couldn't agree on licensing terms with Sun (ZFS is licensed under the CDDL) and so they bailed on it. Oh how I wish they had worked things out.
That said, Oracle is also unlikely to do them any favors.
That said, Oracle is also unlikely to do them any favors.
You can always hope. It's not like Ellison and Jobs aren't BFFs. Oracle did write a version of their DB engine for OSX server for no, discernable, reason at all. I don't remember any customers asking for it particularly so this decision had to come down from way up top.
It's not CDDL - Apple has shipped dtrace for years now which is CDDL code.
Most likely, ZFS was written off for various technical reasons (large RAM requirements to run well, not optimized for portable hardware, etc.) and if there was a legal issue it was probably the NetApp lawsuit against Sun regarding ZFS.
I think a side community project is perfect given this potential concern (even though likelihood is unlikely). Oracle's not going to sue Apple for something like this.
