no license required.
If you want the latest you do - otherwise it's OpenSolaris b134 (and it's open source derivatives such as OpenIndiana, Nexenta etc) or the FreeBSD or Linux ports.
At some point, there will be a divergence from Oracle's ZFS and the open ZFS forks - either that or the open ZFS fork will stay still!
however you can't just turn the ship around. emc, netapp, etc have billions invested in their platforms. further it would be impossible for them to justify the insane premium using an open source base.
Perhaps....but nobody is actually forced to buy high end storage platforms etc etc.
this is the same thing emc/netapp do only they charge an insane premium.
I see....so if I buy a few enterprise drives and shove them in a PC, does that make it a high end storage platform?
Seriously, I think you know that there is a lot more to it than just that.
so performance and availability do not qualify as a high end solution .... unless it says emc or netapp and you spend over a million dollars for it?
They are certainly part of it, but you'd have to elaborate on what you mean by availability - the targets for high end storage platforms are pretty high!