Apparently Jeff Bonwick (CTO of Sun Storage Technologies and head of the ZFS project) and Linus Torvalds met early in May to discuss "something".

While Bonwick's blog post is quite cryptic and ends with "All I can say for the moment is... stay tuned", he left a few clues:

* The blog entry is titled "Casablanca" (obviously referring to the quote: "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship")
* The entry is filed under "ZFS"
* He talks about peanut butter on chocolate and vice versa

With all these hints, it's quite hard not to think about an integration of ZFS into the Linux kernel. In case you didn't follow the discussion around ZFS: The Zettabyte File System is a 128-bit filesystem developed by Sun and published as open source under the CDDL. It's well known for some superior features like support for high storage capacities, copy-on-write, snapshots and clones. Because of patent issues and license problems ZFS can't be integrated into the Linux kernel. I'm wondering if Sun is planning to change it's license and patent policy regarding ZFS.

I'd love to see Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex+1 booting from a ZFS partition.

The Red Hat Desktop Team announced Wednesday:

we have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future. [...]
as a public, for-profit company, Red Hat must create products and technologies with an eye on the bottom line, and with desktops this is much harder to do than with servers. The desktop market suffers from having one dominant vendor, and some people still perceive that today’s Linux desktops simply don’t provide a practical alternative. [...]
Nevertheless, building a sustainable business around the Linux desktop is tough, and history is littered with example efforts that have either failed outright, are stalled or are run as charities.

I guess by "charities" they're referring to the Ubuntu Foundation.

Since Red Hat is one of the leading distributors and open source developers, I'm quite unsatisfied with it's attitude towards Canonicals business model and Ubuntu's success story.

Ubuntu was a huge success because Shuttleworth decided to charge for support and service. Red Hat still charges for software updates on their Enterprise Distributions.

With Fedora, Red Hat patronizes a great and free distribution. Instead of adopting Canonicals business model and strengthen Fedoras support, Red Hat clarifies, that they do not formally support Fedora, but users can turn to a healthy online community to obtain help when they need it.

Dell's (and others) decision on Ubuntu as it's preferred Distribution on Desktops already proves how Canonical and Ubuntu outruns the old "majors".

Better Software? Maybe.
Better business model? For sure.

I'm quite confident that Red Hat will reconsider it's statement in a foreseeable future.