Native port of ZFS for Linux

It makes sense that this surfaces 1 week after reformatting my Ubuntu box to use OpenSolaris and native ZFS.<p>Also of note:<p>This ZFS on Linux port was produced at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) under Contract No. DE-AC52-07NA27344 (Contract 44) between the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC (LLNS) for the operation of LLNL. It has been approved for release under LLNL-CODE-403049.

Did the ZFS patents ever get sorted out? The US government needn't worry about this, they have an exemption, but the rest of the world should care. Sun has a truckload of patents on ZFS that, last I'd heard, they were not granting free to ZFS users, and NetApp thought they had a patent on it as well, at least enough to sue Sun.

I'd like to know how this could be legally redistributable, given the license conundrum CDDL and GPLv2 make. Any idea?

Note that this is just a port of the OpenSolaris code base -- not a reimplementation. CDDL copyrights, patents, etc., are still big considerations before this can be used.

Seems bit old, originating from 2008? Any notable progression lately?

They claim that they're legally free and clear, but a lot of the kernel devs are of the view that kernel modules are derived works of the kernel and therefore have to be GPL.

Would love to see ZFS (or at least something better than HFS) on OS X. Anyone has info on that? Anything in the pipeline?

Just to note: The GitHub account user name is Brian Behlendorf.

I tend to avoid complexities of any kind or form. As long as there's Slackware and JFS, Linux will be sane.