The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly.

Originally ZFS has been designed and developed by Sun Microsystems. ZFS is was a file system and logical volume manager with great abilities. It supported high storage capacities, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, snapshots and copy-on-write clones, continuous integrity checking and automatic repair, RAID-Z and native NFSv4 ACLs. As usual of Sun, ZFS is implemented as Open Source.

So much for that. Now back to Apple’s kickout.

ZFS has been ported to Mac OS X and was released as an open source project on Apple’s Mac OS Forge collaboration site in 2007.  Many rumours were afloat that ZFS becomes the default file system for Mac OS X Leopard, but it appeared only with limited read-only capabilities.

The inclusion of the technology in its early product pages for Snow Leopard Server indicated Apple’s interest in ZFS. But the Apple removed the information on their site and the support for ZFS was not included in either Snow Leopard or Snow Leopard Server.

And the news about the cessation of Apple’s ZFS support, suggests that they have given up the hope of achieving licencing terms for the technology.

Macrumors reports, that Apple yesterday posted a new job listing for a file system engineer, which indicates that the company may be expanding its in-house team to improve or develop its own file system technologies.