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The File-System Fallout of the Reiser Verdict

Posted by timothy on Tuesday April 29, @01:17PM
from the work-from-home dept.
Data Storage Linux
perlow writes "Yesterday, the Open Source community took an emotional hit when veteran Linux programmer Hans Reiser was convicted of first degree murder in the suspicious disappearing of his wife, Nina. While I won't go into the details of the case, as this has been covered extensively in the press, I would like to talk a little bit about how this verdict will impact the technology in play for file system dominance in our favorite Open Source operating system, Linux."

Related Stories

[+] Your Rights Online: Hans Reiser and the "Geek Defense" Strategy 738 comments
lseltzer alerts us to a story in the Washington Post on the defense strategy in the Hans Reiser murder trial. "In the courtroom where Hans Reiser is on trial for murder, [the evidence] might appear to indicate guilty knowledge. But his attorneys cast it as evidence of an innocence peculiar to Hans, a computer programmer so immersed in the folds of his own intellect that he had no idea how complicit he was making himself appear. 'Being too intelligent can be a sort of curse,' defense counsel William Du Bois said. 'All this weird conduct can be explained by him, but he's the only one who can do it. People who are commonly known as computer geeks are so into the field.'"
[+] Your Rights Online: Hans Reiser Guilty of First Degree Murder 1393 comments
Anonymous Meoward writes "Today Hans Reiser was found guilty of first degree murder in Oakland, California. Quoting Wired: 'In a murder case with no body, no crime scene, no reliable eyewitness and virtually no physical evidence, the prosecution began the trial last November with a daunting task ahead... The turning point in the trial came when Reiser took the stand in his own defense March 3.' Whether he really did it or not, Hans basically just didn't know when to shut up."
Firehose:The File System Fallout of the Reiser Verdict by perlow (451482)
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  • Dear Windows Users... (Score:3, Funny)

    by pandrijeczko (588093) on Tuesday April 29, @01:20PM (#23240618)
    ...Bill Gates strangles puppies & treads on the heads of kittens.

    Please stop using NTFS.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by rrkap (634128)

      ...Bill Gates strangles puppies & treads on the heads of kittens.


      Please stop using NTFS.

      But at least Bill Gates hasn't killed his wife.

    • Offtopic? WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sm62704 (957197) on Tuesday April 29, @01:40PM (#23240982) Homepage Journal
      Morons with mod points; either that or Microsoft knee-jerk astroturfers.

      For the learning-impaired at "news for nerds", the parent's point was that the only thing that should matter to you or me about Hans Reiser is the file system he designed and the programs he wrote, and then only if you use the damned things.

      Did you throw away your Naked Gun [wikipedia.org] movies because OJ Simpeon killed those people?

      The tabloid mentality that seems to have overtaken the entire world makes me sick. The file system's designer's personal life is none of my (or your) business.

      On a lighter note, the parent was wrong. Bill Gates doesn't strangle puppies, he shoots them! [wikia.com] And he doesn't stomp kittens' heads, he huffs them. [uncyclopedia.org]

      • Re:Offtopic? WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by LWATCDR (28044) on Tuesday April 29, @02:46PM (#23242060) Homepage Journal
        Nope but ReiserFS3 is pretty old and only getting a few bug fixes and no new features.
        Reiserfs4 is pretty much dead... Unless somebody picks up the code and runs with it which could happen but I really wouldn't bet the server farm on that.
        The simple truth is "Big Deal"
        You currently have a choice between.
        EXT3 which isn't the fastest but it does work.
        JFS which is pretty feature rich and stable.
        and XFS which is also feature rich and stable.
        EXT 4 is coming soon and ZFS may be GPLd at some point.
        The lose of ReiserFS to bit rot isn't the end of the world or really that big of a deal.
        Now the lose of Hans Reiser. Well if he didn't do it then it is very sad. If he did do it then it is also very sad. That is just on the human level and nothing to do with FOSS.

  • Will Hans suddenly develop an interest in cake-based file systems?

  • I'm hoping... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gowen (141411) <gwowen@gmail.com> on Tuesday April 29, @01:21PM (#23240644) Homepage Journal
    that maybe control of ReiserFS will now be in the hands of someone who is not a total cock... sorry, a wife-murdering total cock. Hans Reiser's ability ot play nice with others made you long for Theo de Raadt's sunny demeanor. Given that the code is Free, having it under the control of someone who is not a complete sociopath can't help but the increase uptake of the novel parts of the ReiserFS structure.
      • > Since no one had stepped up to the plate before now, I'm betting against anyone doing so in the future.

        This doesn't make sense. There's a clear reason why nobody stepped up before: Hans Reiser. The guy was clearly a bit of a nutbag, however competent he may be at designing filesystems, and I surely wouldn't have wanted to wage a very public and protracted battle with him over his pet project.

        There are lots of projects that can use programmers and leadership. One that has nobody running it is a lot more attractive to take over than one where the original creator is going to be lurking hatefully in the background, looking for an opportunity to stab you in the back. (Figuratively; but perhaps in Reiser's case, literally.)

      • I'm hoping we'll forget this now (Score:5, Interesting)

        by arth1 (260657) on Tuesday April 29, @01:54PM (#23241212) Homepage Journal
        ReiserFS isn't even a has-been file system, it's an almost-was, and was never a real contender for a top filesystem, no matter how much some users loved it. It was, in reality, half dead by the time Reiser got arrested.

        Why wasn't it taken seriously by everyone?
        - When it encountered problems, it crashed spectacularly. You didn't just lose a file or a block of a file, you lost entire trees and could get metadata instead of file data and vice versa.
        - It lacked basic tools, like "dump"/"restore" or "freeze".
        - The fsck rebuild process was a security nightmare. A user could craft a file with data that would appear to the fsck process to be metadata, and take over the system after a reboot. In typical arrogance, the solution was "don't reboot, then".
        - It didn't support streams or compatible metadata, thus no Mac sharing or SELinux. SELinux in particular is a requirement for many big corporations right now, and not supporting it means no buy.

        And, yes, the arrogance of the maintainer played a part too. But even with a much nicer guy running the show, it would not have been a serious contender for the throne.

        It's time we forget ReiserFS and move on.

  • The same as it affected... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by QuantumRiff (120817) on Tuesday April 29, @01:24PM (#23240696)

    It will affect ReiserFS the same as it affected the company that wrote the NTFS file system was convicted of their crimes. (being a monopoly).

    Or when the creator of Unix (and the C language) was convicted of their crimes (being a monopoly)

    Or the same as it affected Union Carbide when they poisoned a whole town killing everyone. (the former president will be jailed for life if he ever sets foot in India).

    The thing is.. Things are decided on their merits, and price, etc. Not on their creators. Otherwise, Walmart would be bankrupt!

  • Develop from Prison (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Deflatamouse! (132424) on Tuesday April 29, @01:28PM (#23240788) Homepage Journal
    25 years of coding in prison might yield some significant product. You can put him away physically, but I think we should still let his brilliant mind to continue to benefit the society.

    • Re:Develop from Prison (Score:5, Funny)

      by Applekid (993327) on Tuesday April 29, @01:37PM (#23240916)
      Indeed. I look forward to PrisonFS, where you can hide cigs inside the hard drive and they just look like ordinary files, kernel modifications to allow for self-tattooing code (with needles of questionable sterility, of course), and a new kind of distributed computing system where workgroups of computers can form a sort of "gang" in which they bust caps in other competing computers that gain access to their LAN.

    • Re:Develop from Prison (Score:5, Funny)

      by tgd (2822) on Tuesday April 29, @01:57PM (#23241270)
      Imagine how he's going to feel when he realizes all the computers run Windows 2000.

  • Not a lot, really (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Garridan (597129) on Tuesday April 29, @01:34PM (#23240882)
    File systems are like programming languages and operating systems: inventing one is not only fun, but a common assignment during one's computer science education at a lot of universities. Therefore, there will always be more types of file systems around, than anybody would reasonably need. Reiser was a putz, and the benefit of his filesystem over the competition was always marginal. So, he's gone, and either somebody else will grab the torch and maintain his software, or it'll die and nobody will care.

  • XFS (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dieman (4814) on Tuesday April 29, @01:37PM (#23240920) Homepage
    Its stable, its been widely used, has great performance, and can handle most 'large' filesystems. Its not a 'newcomer' to the kernel, either.

    • Re:What happened? (Score:5, Informative)

      by jjohnson (62583) on Tuesday April 29, @02:24PM (#23241742)
      1. There was strong circumstantial evidence that Nina had disappeared because she was murdered:
        1. she didn't show up to pick up the kids from school on the day she was supposed to
        2. friends and family testified that she loved the kids and would never abandon them
        3. friends and family hadn't heard from her in two years
        4. her passport was found, meaning she didn't take it with her if she left herself
        5. her bank accounts were untouched in two years, and showed no abnormally large withdrawals before her disappearance
        6. no travel plans or evidence like a plane ticket was ever located for her
        7. her van was found with her cell phone and $146 in groceries in it, several miles from her apartment.
      3. There was evidence that Hans knew she was gone before it was reported: He went to pick up the kids on the day she didn't; he never tried to phone her immediately after her disappearance.
      4. Lots of weird stuff that could plausibly, but not conclusively, be construed as Hans covering up moving her bloody body in his car: removing the passenger seat, hosing out the interior, a 6" bloodstain on a sleeping bag cover kept in the car.
      5. Miscellaneous other stuff that looks suspicious in context of everything else.

      Now, you're right, that list alone creates a plausible but by no means airtight case that he killed her and disposed of the body. If that were all, I probably would have voted to acquit if I were on the jury.

      But then Hans took the stand for eleven days, against his attorney's advice, and tried to explain all that. And he did such a massively poor job of it that the jury believed he was lying about why he'd done those things. He said he removed the passenger seat because he was sleeping is his car and wanted extra space; but in a Honda CRX, the passenger seat is probably the most comfortable part of the car to sleep in, and removing it leaves a non-flat surface with bolts and bars across it (Hans said that with a good sleeping bag he didn't notice). There was an inch of water in the interior because he hosed it out; Hans said he doesn't remember it bothering him, sleeping on the floor where the passenger seat used to be.

      Since there's little worth lying about that's more important than being falsely convicted of murder, the jury concluded that his lies were covering up a murder. In short, he talked himself into jail. He's not the first defendant to do that.

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