Hi, I have been poking around the internet as of late, looking into the possibility of running ZFS on my new Nextcloud server.
I have 1 issue however: I am still unable to understand the differences between Oracle ZFS, OpenZFS and ZFS on Linux.
From what I understand from Wikipedia, ZFS was split during the Solaris purchase a few decades ago into Oracle ZFS, and Open ZFS. But I still have no idea where ZoL fits into this.
So I was hoping someone could explain to be the differences of:
How they are all related to each other.
If there are any versions I should avoid.
If they are all at feature / performance / stability parity.
Zfs was developed by Sun as an open sourced project, on illumos.
Oracle acquired Sun, and closed the source of ZFS.
The ZFS developers mostly left Oracle and created OpenZFS, so development could continue in the open, using illumos and BSD.
IIRC, OpenZFS can still read in and use pools created up to the point of the split.
When they split, Oracle continued to develop ZFS and retain copyrights etc for it, but as they develop it in the dark, it is generally best practice to avoid it unless you are using Oracle systems, because Oracle might have introduced similar features to OpenZFS, but they chose their own way of developing them.
ZFSonLinux was an open source project to run the zfs tools on Linux, but with the merge, it is effectively the new base.