It probably would have happened, and my understanding (from contacts at Apple) is that they had macos working on top of zfs internally and were gearing up to launch it.
Then Oracle bought Sun, and thats when everything fell apart. Presumably Apple deemed it too much of a legal risk to use zfs even with the CDDL, because of how litigious Oracle is.
Sadly, it's typical of Apple to want special treatment from vendors. In a way, I'm sad that we didn't get a MacOS based on ZFS. That would've been nice.
If you read further in the thread it's hinted at that Apple mainly wanted indemnification from legal action and the Net App saga was ongoing at the time.
Considering that Apple would be rolling it out to many users through high margin computers this is a reasonable concern.
I've used OpenZFS on OSX (https://github.com/openzfsonosx/openzfs#readme) and it's been better to me for cross-os drive sharing than NTFS or UFS, despite their warnings about using it on USB devices
> Sadly, it's typical of Apple to want special treatment from vendors.
If you're going to put a third-party's technology into your products (i.e., the file system that everything is built on), having extra assurances with regards to support and development is not crazy.
Apple tends to buy companies that make the technology they based their products on, but wasn't really going to happen with Sun. At best they'd have to poach the entire ZFS team, but there could still be things like patents and such (which they're allowed to use via the CDDL).
Yes, they incorporated Dtrace, but that wouldn't be a big deal to rip out if things went sideways legally-speaking.
I've used APFS on my Mac, and it worked well enough that I didn't have to think about. Now I've been using ZFS on my daily driver Linux PC and I don't have to think about it either.
I actually prefer ZFS for being able to set up transparent compression. But other than that, I'd be hard-pressed to pick a favorite.
