The other ZFS on OSX

Don Brady, formerly of a twenty year tenure of software engineering at Apple, has started a company to provide a commercially supported version of the latest free ZFS for Mac OS. The company's plans include an all-new native GUI for ZFS management.

Ten's Complement describes itself as "an open source company" and is working closely with the Illumos community, while they decide how to handle the specific licensing terms of their impending code release.

The company continues to develop their source release strategy. All that is publicly known to date is the fact that the CDDL requires the release of any derivative work (patches to the upstream ZFS code), for example as Apple had already done.

The company recently made its external release in March, 2011, as a limited public beta. Currently this implementation is synchronized with ZFS pool version 28 directly from Illumos, which is significantly further ahead than the MacZFS port's zpool version 8. In addition, Don knows the architecture and implementation of behind-the-scenes Mac OS specifics which means that it will likely be a much better port ultimately than MacZFS. Here are more comparative details.

Don's work has repeatedly redefined Apple's storage strategy. He was on the original HFS+ team in the 1990s, and later was one of two intrepid and visionary originators of the skunkworks port of ZFS to Mac OS. His work is the spiritual successor of the MacZFS project, which may not otherwise exist as we know it.

The MacZFS community very excitedly awaits news of their further plans, and offers to help them in any possible way.

Here is a detailed Ars Technica article about the company, interviewing Don, and mentioning MacZFS at the end.