They could strip out DTrace and easily get away with it, even the sturm und drang among blogger fanboys would subside pretty quickly, even among the ones that had ever actually used it instead of just pontificating about it.
There's nothing any less like that than a filesystem. They'd be totally fucked.
Maybe, if developers didn't riot in the streets. I can't imagine Apple would want to remove it, though. They probably leaned on it a lot for the various optimizations they did during the snow leopard development cycle. A huge chunk of what Instruments.app does is dtrace filters under the hood, too.
To take his point to a higher level: it would be much more destructive (in several senses) to have to rip out HFS+ for legal reasons than it would be to rip out Xcode.
Yes, but why would they have to rip out a filesystem that's licensed under CDDL?
The biggest risk Apple would be exposing themselves is to "ZFS ate my data" lawsuits. I think HFS+ is much more likely to eat user data than ZFS ever will...
I would love to use ZFS, but none of my notebooks seem to like OpenSolaris very much and I am not sure if I would like to live two versions of Gnome behind my friends now that Ubuntu spoiled me.
http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/