The question is whether or not "the market" cares enough about "its data" enough that they are willing to pay for what would cost. And data checksumming and RAID 1 (so you can recover from the data corruption) does cost something --- even if it is a 100% expansion in the bytes needed to store the data. And COW file systems do cost something in terms of HDD overhead. Maybe you have enough slack in terms of how you are using your HDD that you don't notice, but if you are using all of your HDD's I/O capacity with an update-in-place file system, when you switch to a COW file system, you will notice the performance hit.

If your only copy of your children's baby pictures are on a solo 4TB drive in your house --- then you may be more than willing to pay that cost. But what if your house burns down? It may be that the right answer is do data backups in the cloud, and there you will want erasure coding, and perhaps more than 100% overhead --- you might erasure coding scheme that has a 150% to 300% blowup in space so you have better data availability, not just data loss avoidance.

I do agree that file systems are hard, but at the same time you need to have a business case for doing that level of investment. This is true whether it is for a proprietary or open source code base. Many years ago, before ZFS was announced, I participated in a company wide study at my employer at the time about whether it was worth it to invest in file systems. Many distinguished engineers and fellows, as well as business people and product managers participated. The question was studied not just in terms of the technical questions, but also from the business perspective --- "was the ROI on this positive; would customers actually pay more such that the company would actually gain market share, or otherwise profit from making this investment". And the answer was "No". This made me sad, because it meant that my company wasn't going to invest in further file system technologies. But from a stock holder's perspective, the company's capital was better spent investing in middleware and database products, because there the ROI was actually positive.

From everything that I've read and from listening to Bryan's presentations, I understanding is that at Sun they did _not_ do a careful business investigation before deciding to invest in ZFS. And so, "Good for Open Solaris!" Maybe it kinda sucked if you were a Sun shareholder, but maybe Sun was going to go belly-up anyway, so might as well get some cool technology developed before the ship went under. :-)

As far as Linux is concerned, at some level, the amount of volunteer manpower and corporate investment in btrfs speaks to, I suspect, a similar business decision being made across the Linux ecosystem about whether or not the ROI of investing in btrfs makes sense. The companies that have invested in ext4 because in no-journal mode, have done so because if what you want is a back-end, local disk file system, on top of which you put a cluster file system like HDFS or GFS or Colossus, and where the data integrity is done end-to-end at the cluster file system level, and not at the local disk file system, you'll want the lowest overhead file system layer you can get. That doesn't mean that you don't care about data integrity; you do! But you've made an architectural decision about where to place that functionality, and a business decision about where to invest their proprietary and open source development work.

Each company and each user should make their own decisions. If you don't need the software compatibility and other advantages of Linux, and if data integrity is hugely important, and you don't want to go down the path of using some userspace solution like Camilstore, or some cloud service like AWS S3 or Google Compute Storage, then perhaps switching to FreeBSD is the right solution for you. Or you can choose to contribute to make btrfs more stable. And in some cases that may mean being willing to accept a certain risk for data loss at one level, because you handle your integrity requirements at a different level. (e.g., why worry about your source tree on your laptop when it's backed up regularly via "git push" to servers around the internet?)