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Hans Reiser Arrested On Suspicion of Murder
Many readers wrote about the arrest today of Hans Reiser, author of ReiserFS, by Oakland, CA police on suspicion of murdering his estranged wife. From the San Francisco Chronicle: "Hans Reiser, 42, was taken into custody at 11 a.m., hours after Oakland police and FBI technicians searched his home in the Oakland hills. His estranged wife, Nina Reiser, 31, has been missing since Sept. 3, when she dropped off the couple's son and daughter at his home on the 6900 block of Exeter Drive... Police made the arrest based on circumstantial evidence and have not found Nina Reiser's body, [Hans Reiser's attorney] Du Bois said. 'I have no idea what the circumstantial evidence is,' he said. 'When I hear what the evidence is against him, I'll make a decision as to whether he'll talk to them.'" kimvette writes, "While the disappearance (and possible murder) of his wife is tragic, Linux users will wonder where this will leave Reiser 4. If Reiser is found guilty, will Novell or IBM pick up the pieces and finish up Reiser 4 for inclusion in the kernel or is this the end of the Reiser filesystem project? Will there be any future for the Reiser filesystem, and if Hans is found guilty and the project is continued, will the project be renamed to avoid notoriety?"
He's arrested for killing his wife and this post asks what's the deal with Reiser 4? Classy kdawson, very classy.
In the case of ReiserFS, the code doesn't get into the mainline kernel without it being reviewed by enough people that there is some hope of maintainability in the absence of one key person.
The problem comes in when no one else wants to maintain a piece of code, but then that's why people pay Red Hat or SuSE cash for their otherwise freely distributable distributions.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
The answer is no. When an OSS maintainer gives up, you can still maintain the software precisely because you have the source so that there are ways of maintaining the software. There is no danger that reiserfs will break in Linux in the forseeable future, because the kernel maintainers will keep looking after it. If Hans Reiser and Namesys had kept the source code to themselves, then his users should be worried.
A website aimed at helping to find her, Help Find Nina Reiser
Common sense is not so common
Just a SUSE developer's (Jeff Mahoney from SUSE Labs) opinion and suggestion. http://linux.wordpress.com/2006/09/27/suse-102-dit ching-reiserfs-as-it-default-fs/
Note that it's not "dropping support for reiserfs", it's "not using reiserfs as default". You're still free to use ext3/reiserfs/xfs if you know they perform well for your workload.
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=reiserfs&m=1095355 06122706&w=2
1 78128079&w=27 5720520&w=2
Hans Reiser:
Well, I am going to try being honest and see what happens.
I am more than 170k in debt, and Namesys is doing badly fiscally. A
technical great success being stabilized now, but then there is my
ongoing fiscal disaster. Once again, we are missing payroll. My wife
is divorcing me in part because I keep going deeper into debt, and I
thank her for divorcing me now rather than later. Unfortunately she is
making the divorce messy enough to keep me from pulling Namesys out of
the fiscal tailspin by consuming all my time with things like proving I
am not making the fantastic amounts of money she claims I am. I hope
next month is better."
Others
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=reiserfs&m=108353
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=reiserfs&m=984246
I live fairly close to where she disappeared. You probably don't know this, but there was an incredible effort to find her. Notices were posted everywhere, with her picture and information about her disappearance. From what I gather, it would be completely out of character for her to have left her children. As a parent, it is easy to tell how connected someone is to their kids. I'm sure her friends know this. For me, there is nothing in the universe that would make me leave my kid. Nothing. I believe she's dead.
Another disturbing thing is you'll see in many of these articles that the police claim Reiser was the last one to see his wife. However, the facts of the state that she went shopping after she left his house; her car was found with the groceries she bought. Clearly then, he was not the last person his wife, as the checker at the supermarket obviously interacted with her.
I dont see how the story works: she drops the kids at his house, she goes shopping, and then..how does he end up killing her? He has the kids with him..at home..she's on the road. When does he have the opportunity to kill her?
Here's a lot of reading material. Some more. A little more. And to top things off here's another article.
Are there plenty of people who feel remorse for killing people if it was a crime of passion or one that they didn't truly want to do but felt compelled to anyways? Sure. But it goes both ways, and there are plenty of people who quite honestly are so deranged that they don't feel any remorse for what they've done. A peer-reviewed scientific study showing that most killers aren't wracked with guilt? I doubt anyone has the time or inclination to play Search-Engine-Monkey for you. Go ahead and get evidence your evidence before you start demanding it from other people. There are plenty of cases where the fact of the matter is that these killers are remorseless, you only have to know an inkling about psychology to understand that. In fact, plenty of these murderers feel justified fully in their actions.
Listen to elucido, he's trying to help you understand the situation. Most people who kill do it because they have serious problems.
"We invented personal computing." - Bill Gates
Holy reiserfsck, how bizzare, how fscking bizarre.
/ 13/n/HeadlineNews/HOME-SEARCHED/resources_bcn_html
Read this for another side of the story:
http://cbs5.com/localwire/localfsnews/bcn/2006/09
There are some other strange aspects to all this, the wife may have been having an affair, but (at least in UK) often divorce lawyers encourage clients to do a 'kitchen-sink' approach to try and wrest custody of the children, so her affair and his domestic violence are both suspect until we get more info.
It will all come out if there is a body, or the wife turns up in Russia.
My little Linux and tech blog
The Reisers were married in 1999 and frequently traveled to Russia, where she was born. They separated in May 2004.
Just long enough to get her green card
Nina Reiser filed for divorce three months later, citing irreconcilable differences and saying their children "hardly know their father" because he was out of the country on business for most of the year, according to court records.
"Verbal statements made in court" BECOMES "Court Transcript" BECOMES "Court Records". There is not anything here saying whether or not it was proven or not.
Nina Reiser was granted a temporary restraining order against her husband in December 2004 after she reported that he had pushed her and was abusive to her. A year later, she agreed not to seek a permanent order.
Temporary Restraining Orders are easy to get, and hard to keep. In a divorce, one of the favorite tactics (of both sides) is to file for a TRO. Usually these get thrown out of court some months later. Judges typically grant TROs because nobody wants to be the judge who denied a TRO against an abusive spouse. But most of the time, TROs are just stupid games that people play.
Hans Reiser was accused earlier this year of failing to pay medical and child-care expenses as ordered by a judge, records show. He pleaded not guilty Aug. 25 to a civil contempt charge and was scheduled for trial in October.
Again, it is very easy to "accuse" somebody. One of the games spouses play is to not send bills to the other spouse, and then file a civil suit against them for "failure to pay". This is usually yet another game in custody and visitation battles.
Not that I am defending this guy, but the "evidence" in the article that he was a "bad man", just isn't any evidence at all.
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!