Why are there no true cross-platform filesystems?

There are stable implementations for Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and BSD (at least). You can export a filesystem from any one of these, unplug the hard drive, plug it into another computer, import the filesystem, and go. Doesn't even have to have the same CPU endianness.

Besides being designed from the ground up to be operating system and CPU endianness independent, it does a ton of other stuff that no other filesystem does. It's a total rethink of the entire filesystem / volume manager / RAID pool concept. All of these things are merged into ZFS, with a user interface that's both radically simpler and far more powerful than managing all of those things seperately.

You can easily add capacity to existing datasets (up to 256 quadrillion zettabytes, it's 128 bit!), do mirroring and striping at the filesystem level, and add hot standby drives. You can combine drives of different sizes into storage pools. You can do rolling drive size upgrades in the future to expand the filesystem size when drives become cheaper, without taking the filesystem offline. It has built-in pervasive checksumming and self-healing data corruption detection, there's a strong focus on data integrity despite flaky hardware, writes are atomic, you can take snapshots and roll back to previous filesystem states, there's an advanced adaptive memory caching system that's far beyond simple least-recently-used caches..

Is that not enough? How about built-in encryption, data compression with your choice of algorithms, deduplication of file data... You can add a small SSD drive to your huge traditional hard drive based dataset to act as an L2 cache for fast, durable writes, fully online maintenance and upgrades, builtin SMB and NFS sharing, you can stream updates...

How does that fit the 'One file system on Linux, OS X and _Windows_' requirement? ZFS is useless for this scenario. No need to sell it if it cannot even start in this competition.

Edit: On top of that, some features that you're selling aren't completely available cross-platform (i.e. builtin NTS/SMB support on Linux, encryption is(?) Solaris only iirc).

Neither of those seem terribly useful for the "UDF filesystem on a shared hard-disk partition" use-case we're talking about, so I don't think Linux's limit of UDF 2.01 is very important in practice.

I have generally found it safe to read from my NTFS drives in Linux (I avoid writing if at all possible). This time, however, when I went to load the result of my work back in Linux, it could not read the folder (Thunar reported some generic IO error). Going back into Windows to investigate, Window's opinion was "It smells like Linux has been here! I can't STAND that guy or anything he touches, so I burned the folder just to be safe. You can thank me later."

As best I can tell, it had something to do with a combination of:

1. Windows Update needing to do things upon shutdown and startup, but then not booting back into it for a month.

2. Linux having been in hibernation rather than halted. Might have had some access bit set on the NTFS drive when it hibernated? I don't actually have the domain knowledge to claim that is what might happen, so it's a complete hunch.

This was really just a rant to get out the anger at lost work. This article was quite timely, and while I'm not glad to see people share my pain (because it's still pain in the end), I hope we one day see improvements.