The Z File System (ZFS) was created by Matthew Ahrens and Jeff Bonwick in 2001. ZFS was designed to be a next generation file system for Sun Microsystems’ OpenSolaris. In 2008, ZFS was ported to FreeBSD. The same year a project was started to port ZFS to Linux. However, since ZFS is licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License, which is incompatible with the GNU General Public License, it cannot be included in the Linux kernel. To get around this problem, most Linux distros offer methods to install ZFS.