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.

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?

[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?

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. :)

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: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??

[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: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

[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: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: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?