alt Hacker NewsWho said it was bad? I thought we were all pretty much in agreement that it was good, and the only thing holding it back from wider adoption into e.g. the Linux kernel was the poison-pill of Oracle's ownership and licensing.
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Actually the licensing issues were from Linux developers' side - Oracle has nothing to say (as the license to the code and patents was given before Oracle got their grubby hands), and Sun IIRC expected CDDL to work similar to the AFS precedent where non-derivative, non-GPL code was allowed into kernel.
The only lawsuit specifically about licensing was from few Linux developers through SFC who disagree with common consensus on how GPL applies in that case and sued Ubuntu for shipping ZFS as a module.
another thing holding it back is the threat of a lawsuit from Netapp.
source: used to work for a storage vendor that was marketing a NAS based on ZFS and got credible threats from Netapp to the point that we sought a partnership with Oracle that included indemnification under Oracles settlement with Netapp.
Some years ago, there were mud-slinging myths being thrown around about ZFS.
Things like "ZFS needs 1GB of RAM per 1TB of storage" and "it requires that RAM to be ECC" were once common to find online.
These sort of thing seemed to lead to widespread beliefs that it was inefficient, expensive, and fragile. None of that is true, of course, but folks might remember and believe these myths and conclude that it is (or was) bad.
(But it's pretty excellent. I've been using it for about a decade, now. It'd be nice if it fit into the Linux kernel better, but I manage anyway.)