> I find it unfortunate that all the effort that has gone into ZFS as essentially a hobbyist copy-on-write filesystem didn't go into btrfs instead.

don't some BSDs and Linux share the same code base for ZFS?

Last I heard FreeBSD switched to ZfsOnLinux as upstream a few years ago before it was merged with OpenZFS.

IMO calling it a hobbyist fs is a bit unfair.

Being called hobbyist software derisively by the Linux community is like being knighted, I assume.

It's not intended to be derisive so much as a simple matter of fact that it's 1.) Not in the mainline kernel; 2.) Isn't supported by most commercial distros; and 3.) Has somewhat ambiguous legal status. For individual use? Knock yourself out. But I wouldn't approve its use for a company unless I had very good and very specific reasons to do so.

While the CDDL isn't a terrible license in a vacuum, it is (according to its author) _intentionally_ incompatible with the GPL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Development_and_Distrib...).

This is, in my opinion, the most important part. It's not some unhappy accident that there are significant legal issues with ZFS and GPL-licenced Linux - that is (allegedly) by design.

As that section says, there is (at least for public consumption) disagreement among then-Sun employees as to what the intent and beliefs were at the time.

I know all those folks to greater or lesser degrees and Sun was a client of mine as an analyst. There were certainly a lot of conflicting motivations and concerns concerning Solaris and Linux.