[dale_glass]

I don't think it's that big of a deal. If that was a big problem, but there was enough interest it would have just been renamed.

The issue as I remember is that ReiserFS was developed as a commercial product by Reiser's company, and after the trial started it fell apart, and with that the original developers had to find new jobs.

It's possible the commercial nature discouraged third party contributions -- who wants to effectively be an unpaid employee?

It also was rather troublesome with frequent stories of corruption, and at that time they were working on ReiserFS v4, which meant that anybody interested in filesystem guts was probably waiting for the next version to show up, rather than spending time on a very complex piece of code that was about to become obsolete. Kind of the same problem that Perl suffered from.

And after all was said and done, ReiserFS 4 was still incomplete and extremely experimental. The list of people looking to polish up a very complex piece of software without the original team's assistance couldn't have been very large.

I think all these things added up together and quickly finished it off.