Because they didn't seem to know any of the simple and nice ideas from distributed systems to solve pain points of managing space, since adding, removing nodes, sharding/partitioning is something you have to figure out pretty much from the start.
> Distributed systems and write arbitration on the same file are still terra incognita.
That's far too aggressive a response for someone who's being sloppy with terminology themselves. "Distributed" covers many different scales. You also use "clustering filesystem" as though it's a synonym, which it very much is not. Among those who have actually built both, like me, distributed and cluster filesystems are very different things. It's fine if you think "true" distributed systems means global scale, but if you're not even explicit (let alone correct) about it you should hardly be condemning others for using definitions closer to general usage. And you definitely shouldn't be pretending to read people's minds with claims about what they "gave no thought" to or "have no idea" about.
P.S. Since I can't reply to your comment below which was quite rightly flagged into oblivion, no, I didn't have anything to do with GFS.
Flagged your comment for this. You should at least glance over my comment history on distributed computing before attacking me on things you don't understand.
I do not care who you are. Your comments on this thread made it crystal clear that you are not familiar with the subject matter: for you distributed has a very narrow meaning of a sharded key-value store, you've succeeded in making that clear. "Cloud", except that's not it.
And whether you "flagged" my comment or not, that's irrelevant to me.
It doesn't have that meaning to me. But in the context of a failed cloud company of Sun refugees the only experience in distributed systems that matters is the experience Sun refugees didn't and couldn't have. For some reason you are claiming absolutely irrelevant things to any of that. And, of course, resorting to personal attacks.
We've asked you repeatedly to stop posting like this to HN. If you keep posting flamey comments we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to do that, so would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules strictly from now on?
