The Future of ReiserFS

lisah writes "With the announcement of Hans Reiser's arrest this week, many people have been wondering what this will mean for his company, Namesys, and the future of his filesystem work. According to a report at Linux.com, employees at Namesys are circling their wagons and plan to continue working on the project 'in the short term.' One employee admits, 'we are rather shaken and stressed at the moment, although I cannot say we didn't see it coming.'"

You know maybe...

[ellem (147712)]

maybe she should have been so enamored with GFS. How about that? Huh? How about she just stop talking about how great Google's File System is FOR ONE MINUTE? Did anyone think bout that?

In other news...

[Dystopian Rebel (714995)]

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer reminded corporate customers that the Open Source model is dangerous to their business.

"I squirt a picture to you, you squirt multimedia back to me," said Ballmer. "Sure, boom boom boom, we can do that and we ~do~ do that. In fact, no one squirts better than we do. But with Open Source, you don't know whose rights you are violating when you squirt.

And worse, open-source programmers tend to have police records. I'm just sayin'."

Re:In other news...

[clickclickdrone (964164)]

>no one squirts better than we do
The thought of Balmer saying that just makes me shudder and not in a good way.

OS Developers arrested

[uneek (107167)]

Hi:

This makes me wonder how many other primary authors of open source projects have been arrested in the past and how this has affected their projects?

Uneek

Re:OS Developers arrested

[Pharmboy (216950)]

This makes me wonder why they didn't put a link to info about his arrest in the article. Not everyone knew this, and it is just sloppy of the editors to NOT include a link to give a bit of context about the arrest.

I found info here [geekzone.co.nz], here [arstechnica.com], and here [nbc11.com]

Re:OS Developers arrested

[$1uck (710826)]

Doesn't this highlight another positive for OS? No seriously, so the lead developer is arrested/killed/in a coma. This means the project *is* not dead, someone somewhere can pick up where he/she left off. If it was closed source, and the lead developer was more than just a cog in a large corporation, who could/would pick up the slack? The source code could conceivably being floating in legal limbo until the affairs are settled. Or am I just being myopic?

Finally, Linux has its killer app.

[by Anonymous Coward]

And Netcraft confirms it.

Problems for Namesys?

[-Neko- (67564)]

"I do not think that just being arrested will affect anything so long as Hans is not actually convicted," says Oleg Drokin, the former release manager at Namesys. "If he is convicted, that might cause problems for Namesys [because] it is operated solely by Hans."

I don't understand. If the guy who runs the company goes away usually it's fairly easy process (albeit longwinded and boring) to get a new general manager, CEO or whatever. Namesys isn't a public company, so they could name their Thanksgiving turkey the CEO. The problem might be, if Hans acted as accountant etc. and did some funny number crunching that is going to drive them into the dirt; of course that would add to Hans' problems, too, if they were ever revealed :D

Is Hans really that important to ReiserFS? Isn't this the whole beauty of GPL code, that there are thousands of people out there who can pick his work up without even involving him, Namesys etc., and continue the 'legacy'?

Re:Problems for Namesys?

[jimicus (737525)]

Depends how large the company was and how big a role the CEO has in running it.

In larger companies, the CEO generally plays golf most of the time.

In smaller companies, it's quite common for the CEO to be designing the products in great detail, and many a promising open source project has withered for lack of a leader - though I can't see that happening in the case of ReiserFS because it's too big and important.

Re:

[swv3752 (187722)]

Hans is that important to Namesys and Namesys is the only group really working on ReiserFS. It is possible for some other group to pick up the project, but Hans aggravated alot of other developers, so...

Re:Problems for Namesys?

[novus ordo (843883)]

I think what he means is that it is Hans Reiser's company. You can't just take someone else's company and let someone else run it without the owner's consent. Calling him important is an understatement. Read this [osuosl.org] interview if you would like to know how important. As for letting someone else run the company...hah I can't even describe the irony. Here's the rundown [cbs5.com]: Basically he got this guy named Sean Sturgeon run his finances "1999 through 2002 and had access to and control over deposits, withdrawals and funds at the Patelco Credit Union."

Reiser said Sturgeon "worked with my wife Nina Reiser and eventually drugged her with ecstasy and seduced her." Reiser alleged, "He then engaged in Bondage, Domination, Sadism and Masochism techniques and continued to redrug her repeatedly over time." He said Sturgeon engaged in those techniques "in an effort to show that he was a better man than I and to convince my wife Nina to conspire with him to steal the Namesys Inc. company assets." He said Sturgeon engaged in those techniques "in an effort to show that he was a better man than I and to convince my wife Nina to conspire with him to steal the Namesys Inc. company assets." Reiser alleged that, "Sean has threatened to have me beaten up by some of his associates in illegal activities and that he would hurt me, my mother or my children if he did not get what he wanted." He also accused Sturgeon of engaging in extortion by threatening to make calls to the Internal Revenue Service to report him and his mother. In addition, Reiser alleged that Sturgeon wrote into a contract that Reiser must participate in "Death Yoga," which he said has the purpose of "slowing down one's heart to the point of death."

You think he might have second thoughts on letting someone else run the business? Just maybe?

Re:Problems for Namesys?

[nuzak (959558)]

You mean your contract doesn't have a death yoga clause? I thought those were pretty much standard.

Damn, I gotta go talk to a lawyer.

Even if not guilty

[L-s-L69 (700599)]

The loss of his wife is likely to have a profound impact upon his work and any future development. I can only hope the community and the other developers are able to step up and carry on the work.

Re:Even if not guilty

[QuantumG (50515)]

his ex-wife.. who's contribution to his work was to claim that he was earning money that he wasn't paying her to raise their children, when actually he was $100k in debt (yeah, couldn't see that coming "let's make a filesystem!" "let's give it away for free!" how could you lose money on that?!) This is one of the reasons why the cops didn't mind arresting him. He really does look like he wouldn't mind seeing her dead.

Then again, who doesn't feel that way about their ex-wife.. except, ya know, those few freaks who part on good terms and have each other over for dinner with their new partners. *shudder*

Some Related Reading

[RAMMS+EIN (578166)]

I've been reading a bit, trying to get a handle on what's been happening and what may be next for the people involved in this (I trust the filesystem will be fine). Here are the most interesting parts of what I've read:

AUTHORITIES SEARCH HOME OF MISSING WOMAN'S HUSBAND [cbs5.com]

ATTORNEY: HANS REISER 'DISTRUSTFUL' OF OAKLAND POLICE [cbs5.com]

UPDATE: POLICE CHARGE HANS REISER WITH MURDER [cbs5.com]

Missing woman's blood found in husband's house [mercurynews.com]

All in all, it's very disturbing. I get the impression at least one of the people involved in this is completely insane.

Re:Some Related Reading

[jackbird (721605)]

Wow, completely insane doesn't even begin to describe it. My favorite line:

"In addition, Reiser alleged that Sturgeon wrote into a contract that Reiser must participate in 'Death Yoga,' which he said has the purpose of 'slowing down one's heart to the point of death.'"

I think the most shocking thing about this is

[le0p (932717)]

that a Filesystem designer actually had a wife.

Efficiency gains

[InterruptDescriptorT (531083)]

If he did kill his wife, which is nowhere near certain, and then subsequently chopped up the body, I bet the pieces are of manageable size and spread evenly throughout a wooded area for easy, order-N retrieval...

Re:Efficiency gains

[anno1a (575426)]

Clearly you haven't studied how reiserfs (3 at least) works. It doesn't use block sizes, it puts the data as compact as possible and uses a tree to figure out exactly where it is. This is obviously important if the police is ever to have a chance at finding the body. He'll probably have an algorithm at home, such that if they find one piece, they can find the rest following that. :)

Reiser Sent to Userland Jail

[Prototerm (762512)]

Anyone else see the irony here?

Dear Slashdot

[scotch (102596)]

Please do not follow this story. The last thing we need it periodic stories over the next year as the trial progress with fighting and uninformed commentary from the peanut gallery on criminal matters. It will be like having our our own little scott peterson case, which I'm sure we can all agree, would be a big fucking waste of time for everyone.

Thank you.

Dear Slashdot Reader

[RAMMS+EIN (578166)]

Please do not follow this story. The last thing we need is periodic comments over the next year as the trial progresses from readers who aren't interested in the matter and feel a need to bother other readers with that sentiment. It is not like anyone is forced to read these threads, which I'm sure we can all agree, would be a big fucking waste of time for everyone.

Thank you.

who are these people?

[minus_273 (174041)]

to put faces to names
hans reiser [idiom.com]
nina reiser [ninareiser.com]

Re:We saw it coming??

[MartinG (52587)]

Nobody knows if he did kill his wife.

I assume they meant that they saw his arrest coming. (Since when wives disappear, husbands routinely get arrested or at the very least intensively questioned by police)

"I didn't kill my wife!"

[BeeBeard (999187)]

Well no, Hans Reiser didn't do it. A one-armed man sent by a pharmaceutical company did it.

Re:"I didn't kill my wife!"

[JustOK (667959)]

...but I thought Hans shot first?

Re:

[jobsagoodun (669748)]

Didn't AOL PUBLISH [slashdot.org] this a few months ago?

Re:We saw it coming??

[Rumagent (86695)]

this means the police have evidence that he *did* kill his wife

Or think they do. Or hope they do. Or just don't care if they do. The police is not exactly an organization which is known for its infallibility.

Re:We saw it coming??

[by Anonymous Coward]

The police is not exactly an organization which is known for its infallibility.

Man, isn't that the truth - they totally sucked after Sting left...

Re:We saw it coming??

[T.E.D. (34228)]

To arrest someone you have to have evidence

No you don't. Police can arrest anyone at any time. They do have to eventually charge you with something or release you (at least sometimes they do. The principle is Habeas corpus [wikipedia.org], which our government has spent the last 5 years undermining).

I can understand why you'd want to think this way. People like to believe that anyone the government goes after must have somehow deserved it. Its a shame that reality doesn't allways work that way.

Probable Cause

[westlake (615356)]

To arrest someone you have to have evidence
No you don't. Police can arrest anyone at any time.

As as mattter of law, this is simply not true.

"PROBABLE CAUSE - A reasonable belief that a person has committed a crime. The test the court...employs to determine whether probable cause existed for purposes of arrest is whether facts and circumstances within the officer's knowledge are sufficient to warrant a prudent person to believe a suspect has committed, is committing, or is about to commit a crime. U.S. v. Puerta, 982 F.2d 1297, 1300 (9th Cir. 1992)." Legal Definition of Probable Cause [lectlaw.com]

Re:We saw it coming??

[Koroviev (892052)]

He meant the arrest. This is the full quotation:

Yes, we are rather shaked and stressed at moment, altough I can not say, we didn't seen it coming. I, personally, really like how US police acted exactly like their russian counterpart: e.g. sitting on their ass for whole month, waiting, so they can declare person officially missing and then just press charges against whoever looks most vulnerable. Well, probably I am wrong. Time will show.

Re:We saw it coming??

[Speare (84249)]

I think the "We saw it coming" quote was not in reference to the actual crime, but in the downwardly spiralling finances the group knew about. I hadn't even seen anything about this story until the LAST slashdot article, and someone linked some public emails that showed that the group was quite aware that doom was approaching.

Re:We saw it coming??

[Aethedor (973725)]

Why doesn't the police use Hans' Journal to recover his lost wife?

Re:As expected

[MartinG (52587)]

Hans probably murdered his wife

Not sure if I'm feeding a troll here, but the man has BEEN ARRESTED! That is all!

If you have any evidence that he killed his wife, be sure to let us know. (and let the police know of course)

Re:As expected

[_xeno_ (155264)]

And now that he's been arrested, the police have described some of their evidence against him [mercurynews.com]. They found her blood in his house and in his car.

We don't know if he did it - yet - but we know more than enough to say that it's most probable that he did. It is, of course, possible he didn't, and we all hope that Nina will be found alive somewhere, but the most probable outcome is that Hans Reiser has, in fact, murdered Nina.

Re:As expected

[denebian devil (944045)]

They forgot to mention the most important piece of evidence in their arsenal: They reviewed the AOL search records that were released and identified record #456365 as likely to belong to Reiser, and noted many suspicious searches such as "I hate Nina Reiser" and "how to kill Nina Reiser without getting caught".

The most offensive part of this evidence of course is that Hans Reiser uses AOL Search....

Re:As expected

[by Anonymous Coward]

If you have any evidence that he killed his wife, be sure to let us know. (and let the police know of course)

Oh, you mean like the blood splatters that were found in HIS car that has been confirmed as HER blood?
And the fact that the rear seats are missing from said car?
And the fact that he actively attempted to hide the car from police?
And the fact that he had books on how law enforcement handles homicide investigations?

Now, it could be the case that his wife had a nose bleed or had suffered a paper cut while riding with Hans, and it could be true that the whole hiding the car things was a misunderstanding (or fearing that the missing rear seat would look bad, he actually did try to hide it in panic), and it could be true that he purchased the books knowing that he would be a likely suspect so he wanted to know what was coming. However, the above taken with other observations about his behaviour does not paint a rosey picture. Sure, he is innocent until proven guilty, but there is at least enough evidence so far to strongly implicate him. It's not one of these "heck, we have no evidence and no clue, so lets just arrest the husband" deals.

Re:As expected

[DagdaMor (518567)]

All of which is Circumstantial Evidence, and a bit flimsy to prosecute on when no one has found a body yet.

Re:As expected

[KutuluWare (791333)]

You've been watching way too much CSI if you think this evidence isn't enough to take a case to trial. Not every murder case ends with the forensic investigators finding a tiny shard of a unique knife mande only once in history by the accused's next door neighbor which is metallically linked to the handle of a knife found in a dumpster with the accused fingerprints on it nearby some ashes that have remnants of the victims DNS embedded in the one tooth that survived the burning process etcetcetcetc.

In many situations, the blood in his car *by itself* would be enough for a DA to decide to try the case. People often place way too much import on the idea of "circumstantial evidence"... it's still evidence. Given enough of it, a good prosecutor can employ a strategy of diminishing probabilities: one single piece of evidence may only narrow down the potential suspect list to a few thousand... but each additional piece of evidence narrows the field further and further until the number of people which fit *all* of the evidence is increasingly small, and the likelihood that someone other than the accused is guilty becomes very small.

As for not having a body, that is certainly a problem when attempting to prove murder (it's one more reasonable doubt the defense can introduce).. but again, the presence of blood, especially if there turns out to be a large quantity of it, has been used many times in the past to infer murder in the absence of a body.

--K

Re:As expected

[squiggleslash (241428)]

I agree. I think people forget that the standard is "Beyond reasonable doubt", not "Mathematically proven to be true."

Fiction is a pretty awful thing to judge standards of evidence from. How many people have watched dramatisations of old Agatha Christie novels (Poirot, etc) and wondered how the hell the "evidence" given could possibly be seen as enough (it's convenient that her murderers always make a full confession once the fact that they could have been the only person with access to the knife that night because they were the only person aware that it was in an unlocked bathroom on the floor.) We have that, and then we have CSI. Real police work seems to be rather more, well, "real world", than that.

Re:As expected

[A beautiful mind (821714)]

Investigators have also recovered books on how police investigate homicides, which were obtained by Hans Reiser a few days after his wife's Sept. 3 disappearance, the sources said.

I don't know a lot about the other stuff, but this seems to be on HIS side, rather than against him. He acted like I would act, like a geek would act imo in this respect. To put it into geek terminology, he read the HOWTO after he discovered a bug. This would rather point into the direction he didn't knowingly create the bug in the first place.

My point is, if you'd want to kill your wife, you'd obtain these books BEFORE you kill your wife, study them thoroughly for a long time and then despose them. Hans Reiser is not stupid. Of course it is all possible that if she were murdered by him, it was an impulse murder. Who knows. We have no evidence and facts.

Re:They saw a murder coming?

[MartinG (52587)]

The way I read it, they saw an arrest coming.

Re:Who cares?

[Lord Bitman (95493)]

Yeah, I know; but, http://www.mugshots.org/misc/bill-gates.html [mugshots.org]

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

Ever considered that this investigation has been going on for well over a month?

If he was the only real suspect they had, and they had no reason to assume that he hadn't done it, why wouldn't they arrest him? "We saw it coming" refers to him being arrested, not to him (possibly) killing his wife.

Re:

[oyenstikker (536040)]

After the disappearence of his wife, they saw the arrest coming. (If your estranged wife disappeared you would be the number one suspect.) He did not say that he saw him killing his wife coming, or that he even thinks he did it.

Re:

[rjstanford (69735)]

He might have been rich as Bill Gates, and he still should have been a suspect.

Oh, absolutely. But most suspects don't get arrested. Suspects against whom the prosecution feels that it has enough evidence to make a strong case get arrested. Being an estranged spouse isn't usually, in and of itself, damning evidence in a murder trial. Prosecutors don't generally play the "let's just arrest everyone we can think of and see which case will stick," method.

Re:

[jimicus (737525)]

Hans' wife has been missing for some time.

In these cases, spouses and ex-spouses are always the first suspects.

Regardless of whether or not Hans has done anything wrong (and the public have no evidence either way), it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that unless convincing evidence to the contrary turned up, he'd be arrested.

Re:Life outside of coding

[iBod (534920)]

I think there's truth there.

Working intensly on one single thing (esp. software) just fucks your brain eventually.

Your partner, kids, family and friends should be the biggest kick in your life, not some stupid pile of fucking code.

I used to be really proud to be a software designer, thinking software apps were a big boon to mankind. The more I look around me, the more I think that computer tech (and particularly the web) is isolating and dehumanising us all.

Re:Life outside of coding

[fumblebruschi (831320)]

Working intensly on one single thing (esp. software) just fucks your brain eventually. I don't agree. I think you're confusing cause and effect; that is, I think some people are drawn to occupations or hobbies where they focus intensely on one subject, because that's what appeals to them. Your partner, kids, family and friends should be the biggest kick in your life, not some stupid pile of fucking code. Why? I see this sentiment a lot on /., and as far as I'm concerned statements like this are just another way of saying "Everyone should do what *I* think is right instead of following their own inclinations."