History

ZFS was originally developed by Sun Microsystems for the Solaris operating system. The source code for ZFS was released under the CDDL as part of the OpenSolaris operating system, and was subsequently ported to other platforms.

The illumos project was founded as an open source fork of OpenSolaris.

OpenZFS is the truly open source successor to the ZFS project. Development thrives as a part of illumos, which has added many features and performance improvements. New OpenZFS features and fixes are regularly pulled in from illumos, to all ports to other platforms, and vice versa.

Milestones

 * 2001 - Development of ZFS starts at Sun Microsystems with 2 engineers.
 * 2005 - Source code released as part of OpenSolaris.
 * 2006 - Development of FUSE port for Linux started.
 * 2007 - Apple began porting ZFS to MacOS X
 * 2008 - Port to FreeBSD released as part of FreeBSD 7.0.
 * 2008 - Development of native Linux port started.
 * 2009 - Apple's ZFS port closed; the MacZFS project continued to develop the code
 * 2010 - OpenSolaris is discontinued. Further development of ZFS on Solaris is no longer open source.
 * 2010 - illumos is founded as the truly open source successor to OpenSolaris, and continues to develop ZFS in the open. Ports of ZFS to other platforms continue porting upstream changes from illumos.
 * 2012 - Feature flags are introduced to replace legacy on-disk version numbers, enabling easier distributed evolution of the ZFS on-disk format to support new features.
 * 2013 - alongside the stable version of MacZFS, ZFS-OSX uses ZFS on Linux as a basis for the next generation of MacZFS
 * 2013 - the first stable release of ZFS on Linux
 * 2013 - OpenZFS project is officially announced.