it is big enough that it prevents distributions to include zfs. and that in reality is the problem. i would not care much if all distributions decided to ignore the copyright issue like canonical does and i could therefore get reliable support for zfs. but alone the thought of having to boot a rescue system to fix my broken computer and then not having zfs support because no one built a rescue system with it included is making the risk to high.
Distributions aren't locked from distributing ZFS, the only group that actually is suing is few kernel developers w/ their lawyers who have non-standard understanding of copyright (including one that isn't norm for the linux kernel, including for filesystems).
who is at fault doesn't really matter. the end result is that distributions aren't including it, and that kills it. unlike almost anything else which i can add to a system after booting it, filesystems need to be available from the start. until debian, fedora, suse, etc are convinced that there is no threat this just won't happen.
That's fair, yes.
I guess my specific "bubble" simply didn't have that issue for a long time