People forget when Microsoft injected cash in Apple when it was going nowhere.

Mightier companies than Apple have fallen, and unfortunately for them it begins to look like they are living from a "perception marketing bubble".

Remember Nokia? It was washing the floor with the competition. Apple did very well to change some of the paradigms of the mobile phone platform, but they have contributed very little and the release of "cheaper" iPhones recognizes that the only differentiator now is in price not in features.

And that is the problem for Apple: to keep charging for a phone that does pretty much the same as any other you have to resort to gimmicks: selling golden phones for example, in technology that can take you only so far.

Proof: people wanted a phone just because it was golden. That is not innovation, is hype, sooner or later the bubble will burst and all the chickens will come home to roost.

The people in charge of ensuring electronics are safe are government and standard agencies, not manufacturers of competing products who use what seems like monopolistic practices parading as concern for their consumer.

People buying these gadgets are sophisticated enough not to appreciate Apple and its products with shoddy third parties.

There are very simple reasons for this:

Since most infrastructure is not located on these countries, they can't serve a warrant to a CA to break SSL for example, and their influence in standard bodies to corrupt those standards, as the NSA is allegedly doing, is negligible overall.

Also those countries don't have the infrastructure (and although there are many bright people there, I wonder if they have enough expertise) to carry out sophisticated hacking attempt at the level at which apparently the NSA may be operating.

Of course if you think pother countries are playing this game feel free to continue speculating, but in the balance of probabilities it seems unlikely.

In Linux , perhaps not much, although I find the zfs interface (zpool and zfs commands) and design very clear and intuitive.

Also perfromancewise I really don't know if ZFS can be beaten, at least for certain tasks: taking a snapshot looks like a trivial task.

In Solaris ZFS is tightly integrated with zones (virtualization) and clusters (resilience).

It is just amazing all what you can do with all these components working with each other (Linux is not even remotely close).

Uh?

You create dataset on top of a zpool. Then you impose quotas in your datasets, which can be resized at will (you want to reduce the dataset? Empty the data from it and change the quota accordingly. Want to enlarge the dataset? Just increase the quota).

Datasets are what you mount as what we traditionally understand as filesystems, that you can "resize" at your hears content.

If you are talking about zpools, there are commands to add or remove devices as needed, and the pool can even use a bigger (why would you put an smaller?) device as soon as it is detected, starting the resync automatically.

You clearly have not been paying attention to the news, have you?

After the leaks of Snowden regarding general malfeasance from security agencies against the encryption standards that we require to communicate safely and securely (like with your bank, just saying) you can't trust any software that you can't build (or know other people more capable can't build) from scratch.

The GPL guarantees that no stupid institution or individual has free reign to corrupt the computational resources you are using.

Other licenses wax lyrical on this, and the consequence is that your precious Apple OS and applications are now tainted, because you have no way to know if they have backdoors or not.

What does this have to do with ZFS you ask?

Well, encryption. ZFS has the capability to encrypt the datasets you are using, but unfortunately its license would not make it suitable for truly secure encryption in the cases where the company or individual implementing it (Oracle, ahem,ahem) chose not to make the source code available.

At that point you have no way to know if backdoors have been added to your implementation of ZFS.

So again, how is GPL, a license that is protecting your security, the problem?

From one of the search results:

"Microsoft's contribution in the grand scale of Linux is tiny, with Red Hat, Intel, Novell and IBM accounting for almost 25 per cent of all changes. "

In any case, if they release the code under the GPL I have no beef with that, I see it as a very small capitulation from their part.

The day they open the whole thing I'll forgive them. Maybe.