> BTRFS was started by Oracle. There are contributors from Redhat and other places now, it's bigger. Oracle could fire Chris Mason and BTRFS should continue.
On the other hand, ZFS works, is pretty stable, and is already available on BSDs as well as Solaris. Furthermore, while the OSX port effort was stopped (apparently due to legal/licensing concerns) it could be restarted depending on Oracle's attitude. And as kia points out, ZFS/btrfs if a redundancy and Oracle "owns" both projects. Oracle tends to eliminate redundancies in product space, so it's unlikely both projects will continue in parallel.
I don't think btrfs having been started by oracle will have much impact in the decision.
> Furthermore, while the OSX port effort was stopped (apparently due to legal/licensing concerns)
I'm not so sure about this. Apple's recent actions seem to point to them wanting to control as much of the shipping code in their OS as possible. An external dependency on ZFS (especially where it may be deprecated by Sun at some point, forcing them to maintain it) could be a bad thing for them in the long run, vs. a modern filesystem that they've built themselves from the ground up, to their own needs.
ZFS is a far superior filesystem to anything Apple has now (at least, in public), and they obviously had it ported already (even including read/write support for Leopard that you could download from their website). On top of that, ZFS is open-source and there are no license restrictions on filesystem modules in OS X (vs. Linux's GPL restrictions).
In the end, I think they just wanted to own everything, top to bottom, and go in the direction that suited them best.
> I'm not so sure about this. Apple's recent actions seem to point to them wanting to control as much of the shipping code in their OS as possible
If the project is under a license they can use (MIT, BSD, something like that) they do have that control, even if they're not project leads.
> On top of that, ZFS is open-source and there are no license restrictions on filesystem modules in OS X
There is one thing Apple likes even less than not having control over their OS, and it's patent risks. http://blogs.netapp.com/dave/2007/09/netapp-sues-sun.html (and Sun not offering any guarantee against patent issues as far as I know) is why they dropped ZFS originally.
I'd argue that btrfs is not a product, but part of their support for the Linux platform. Oracle has a big Linux install base, and the primary commercial competition for these types of installs this is Microsoft SQL Server. The more powerful and useable Linux is, the less attractive a Windows-based option looks.
On the other hand, ZFS works, is pretty stable, and is already available on BSDs as well as Solaris. Furthermore, while the OSX port effort was stopped (apparently due to legal/licensing concerns) it could be restarted depending on Oracle's attitude. And as kia points out, ZFS/btrfs if a redundancy and Oracle "owns" both projects. Oracle tends to eliminate redundancies in product space, so it's unlikely both projects will continue in parallel.
I don't think btrfs having been started by oracle will have much impact in the decision.