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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?"
I hope they let him code in prison.
He's arrested for killing his wife and this post asks what's the deal with Reiser 4? Classy kdawson, very classy.
The filesystem with killer performance.
This brings up an interesting line of questioning. Are OSS projects that rely so heavily on a single person able to be trusted for widespread use? OSS and Linux zealots scream the advantages of using that kind of software, but is it a smart business decision to deploy something that could potentially lose all support if its project manager is in a fatal car accident? I'm the first to admit my own ignorance on a lot of the heirarchy of OSS projects. Are concerns like this valid or is the community able to pick up where someone left off with minimal interruption to clients?
Four roommates. No microwave. You do the math.
What if he's found guilty, and the project is continued by other people, and renamed to avoid infamy, and Reiser loses his first appeal because his lawyer fails to subpoena critical records from the medical examiner's office, and Reiser 4 is finally completed and included in Linux 5.0, but develops stability issues, and around that time Hans is acquitted in a later appeal based on new evidence, and he rejoins the project? Will they change the name back?
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
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
People need to remember that there are human lives involved here. There are also children in the mix. This is NOT a tragedy for the Reiser filesystem.
Okay, so I'm not a good person.
All Reiser has to do is roll back the journal on his wife's deletion. Problem solved by superior software!
There. How's that for tasteless?
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.
Really!
Well, that's what they tell us, anyway.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
If Hans Reiser wasn't the author of a somewhat well known filesystem, but instead some other random guy who was uninvolved in free software, his being arrested wouldn't be on Slashdot in the first place.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
A website aimed at helping to find her, Help Find Nina Reiser
Common sense is not so common
If she went grocery shopping after she dropped off the kids with him, doesn't he have a good alibi? They did find her car with grocery bags inside abandoned somewhere. It appears that the investigators were presumptuous unless there is some additional information they have that they did not release.
Just my $0.02
This isn't meant to be funny or insensitive ... but if he did do it and is found guilty it seems like he'll have a bunch of time on his hand. You know, with the long jail sentence and all. Is their a reason why he can't continue working on this project from jail? Also, working on a OSS with your free time in jail seems like it might get you some good behavior points.
Are OSS projects that rely so heavily on a single person able to be trusted for widespread use?
Compared to a closed source project that relies so heavily on a single person, the open source project is a much safer bet.
Are concerns like this valid or is the community able to pick up where someone left off with minimal interruption to clients?
You should very much take those considerations into account. With open source, you have two advantages compared to the same project when it's closed: (1) you know who the project relies on, and (2) it is clear under what conditions the project can be continued.
A very important question.
A coworker of mine uses an indicator he calls the "bus factor" to determine the likelihood of discontinued support for a particular tool or library.
The "bus factor" is simply defined as "the number of people who have to be hit by a bus before the fundamental understanding of the underlying codebase is lost."
garethw
I know, Microsoft have paid the police to do this, to discredit a Linux FS?
Totally, dude. Like, this one time, Micro$uxx paid this chick to be this like hardcore open-source dude's girlfriend, and like, she made him chili with peanuts in it, which he like would like totally have died if he ate it? Way of the world, man *massssssivvvee toooooke* way of the fuckin' world.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Do doctors who use information gleaned through Nazi human tolerance testing (i.e. most of them) support Nazis?
There are lives at stake here!
I don't know. If you ask me using a filesystem associated with a murder would be WAY METAL . . . . .
When Jason Haas was in a car acciedent linux PowerPC suffered. But eventually others pick up and run with it. He was alright
/ 089246&mode=thread
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/03/24
Interesting to note the different temperment of slashdot articles 6 years ago. No jokes..
Better than supporting Microsoft.
[kidding! kidding!]
Well, generally when somebody gets accused under an unjust law or accused of something many of us don't consider a crime, lots of folks will rally to the cause and suggest donating for their defense.
When somebody gets accused of something we can all agree is unequivocally bad, like murdering the mother of his children, my reaction is "let justice take its course." This seems fair to me, especially when we have no idea what the evidence is against him. Lots of people get accused of lots of crimes all the time and I don't generally donate money to their legal defense unless I think the law under which they are being prosecuted is terribly unjust.
From TFA:
Du Bois complained today that police had not allowed him to meet with his client after the arrest. He said investigators were keeping Reiser in isolation.
Did the whole "everybody is an Enemy Combatant if we say so" thing start already and no one told me? What exactly is this "isolation" where you can't contact your laywer?
sic transit gloria mundi
People are complex. There brains are complex. Sometimes there is no amount of love and support that can turn a guy around.
Secondly..Prison is the worst rehabilitation... Constant contact with other violent people usually is a negative influence.
Lastly, your logic is horrible. I'll use your line of argument in another situation:
I know a smoker who is 95 years old, therefore smoking is safe.
??? Well--Are you ready to say, "point conceded?"
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Long ramble short? Within a week or two no executive is going to remember who this Reiser guy is, let alone that his filesystem may be powering their systems... and that's ASSUMING someone points them to this news article and they make the connection in the first place.
I don't know if it's all that sad... I'd never really heard anything of the guy before this, other than his name attached to his FS, and the wikipedia article was rather sparse, so I google'd around to get an idea of who he is.
You call for sympathy for the man, but as far as I can tell from this interview, and a few random forum threads around the internet, he seems like a really smart and clever, well-educated guy, a really good programmer, but kind of an arrogant douche. I mean, he talks about how he hates homework and wishes you could just study and then discuss to prove your knowledge, but then he stresses the importance of code review and benchmarking (which seem, to me, the "homework" of programming tasks) and belittles his own employees for not doing it well enough.
I'm not trying to flame the guy out or anything. Like I said, I knew nothing about him before my last 15 minutes of searching, but from what I saw in that little sliver (and I know that doesn't provice me a fully developed mental image of the man) it seems like he might deserve some of the jokes.
I'd say if you have sympathy or money to donate - give it to the kids.
And watch, I bet I get bad karma for just trying to point out that it seems (to the untrained eye) that he might have bad karma.
The name is not tainted. Whatever one's opinion of Hans Reiser (I personally have none), ReiserFS is pretty much universally accepted as a very fine filesystem, and there's no reason why that should change.
;-)
However, having said that, it might in fact be a plus to describe it as a killer filesystem...
*ducks*
And why is that exactly? People should get credit for their contributions to society, just as they are punished for causing harm to the same. Nobody is suggesting letting convicted murderers go free, but perhaps someone who led an exemplarily life - volunteer work, good parenting, clean record - until the age of 40 shouldn't spend the rest of his/her life in prison for a single murder. Certainly a person who still have a high potential to contribute shouldn't be denied this opportunity even in jail. Think of a PC/broadband setup in a cell, parole to work in a science lab, canvas and paint and so on. Would you deny pen and paper to a jailed poet?
I don't think there is any need to be pedantic here. Can you afford to run closed source applications knowing that the vendor could drop support? From a risk assessment standpoint, is it better to have access to the source code even if you could not personally do anything with it? At the very least, if the program is worth something to you, you have the option to drop some spare change into a bounty to have your problem fixed. And if the program is worth nothing to you, what difference does it make if it doesn't work for you?
A steaming cup of soykaf would be real wiz right now.
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
Why does everyone forget this cornerstone of the legal system, an accused person is innocent unless proven guilty. It is very easy to accuse someone of something bad, but the accusation alone causes a lot of damage to reputation.
This doesn't change what I think of Hans Reiser at all. If he's convicted of murder, that's different, but nothing like that has happened. A husband is a natural suspect in such a case. I hope that his wife is OK, but I have no reason to believe that Hans is responsible.
When I was in highschool, our principal was accused of sexual misconduct due to some activities that allegedly took place with a student. This shocking accusation made the news, and all the parents were horrified. But very few people went to the actual trial, and when the man was acquitted it did not make the news. Give everyone their chance and let the legal system do its job.
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.
Isn't there some kind of immunity for authors of large open source projects?
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?
If he is found guilty, the name of the filesystem will have to be changed, too. Otherwise it will fall into obscurity along with MansonFS, OswaldFS and the great-but-forgotten object-based, journalling OJSimpsonFS.
Free as in mason.
Think about it: two little (?) kids just had their world collapse. Their mother may be dead. Their father may be in prison. Aside from these two unimaginable losses, the kids probably also face the uncertainty of who will raise them at this point. They're scared, and can't turn to either parent for comfort perhaps for the first time in their short lives. IMHO the status of ReiserFS inclusion is completely insignificant compared to this issue.
Of course you're absolutely right, but Slashdot is not the appropriate place to discuss what will happen to Hans Reiser's children. It is the appropriate place to discuss what will happen to Hans Reiser's filesystem. You're more than welcome to do both, of course, but please don't complain about the latter here.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Note that this guy is very smart and very cockey. This isn't Scott Peterson making anchor weights in his garage. The standard interview isn't going to do the trick with this guy. If he did do it I bet he thought of a special way to get rid of the body. And now we have OJ going to LUG meetings. Same deal even if he didn't do it.
... many of the Amish actually attended his funeral and mourned his death./ 10/07/national/a191914D02.DTL
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006
I can't preach to anyone here about hate and revenge myself, due to my past reactions to things, but what those Amish people did really impressed me. Any members of the phoney religions of peace on here(you christians, muslims, jews, etc...) might want to take some notes from the Amish. I realize they are a christian sect, but their EXAMPLE spoke to me louder than the millions of words I've heard come from christians(or the other two "religions of peace"). If all religions did their preaching that way, they'd make the world a better place, instead of the shithole they seem bent on turning it into in the name of their "faith".
It is the general consensus in the psychological community that a conscience is something to be trained.
Don't let the gravity of the accusations prevent you from running the classic experiment with this. Ask a 5 or a 6 year old child to kill his brother/sister/pet/... (Be prepared for the situation that he might actually try to do it). You will obviously need to stop the interaction between the "killer" and his "victim" shortly after. Then ask the kid what happened. Why it did/did not do what you asked. You will be very surprised by the answers.
Child soldiers are a very clear illustration of what can happen if a child's conscience is badly trained. These children are trained to kill at an age of 5 or 6 (12 at the most) and they kill. They don't stop, they don't pause. They don't think they've done anything wrong.
Lots of people think this is related to the motivations of terrorists, where violent religious conviction takes precedence over rationality.
Now, that isn't to say there aren't violent psychopathic criminals. Most serial killers, and violent sex offenders who target adult women, would qualify. And it is true that they are extremely hard to rehabilitate (some would say impossible). But they aren't the only ones behind bars. In fact, I'm not even convinced they represent a signifigant fraction of violent criminals - the numbers I've seen vary wildly, which suggest to me that nobody knows how many of them exist with any certainty.
To give them as an example of the futility of rehabilitation is utterly ridiculous. It's like taking a rabid dog as a typical example of what most strays are like.
The "average" person is quite capable of murder, given the right incentive, or the right lapse in judgement. Most "crimes of passion" would qualify. Do you really think somebody who, to give an example, kills their wife after catching her in bed with another person is automatically psycho? Granted a psychopath put in that position is more likely to commit violence than an average person, but that doesn't make the average person incapable of murder, it merely makes him statistically less likely to commit it.
To presume all who commit crimes are suffering from mental illness, or are in some way less human, is a common error. We wish to distance ourselves from those we consider evil, by claiming that we could never do such a thing. But make no mistake; this is denial, plain and simple.
That's not to say that there aren't criminal psychopaths in the world; rather it is to admit that average, mentally healthy people, under the right conditions, can do things we as a society consider monsterous. For every psycho killing people at random, there are a dozen "average" people killing for revenge, for profit, for ideology, or for any number of other reasons.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
He caught his wife using ext3.
I would be interested to know how many of the people commenting have been personally acquainted with a murder suspect. I was, once. Air Force guy, he was deployed, his wife fooled around on him. She ended up shot one night. He had taken the kids to a party that night, but I don't think he had any witnesses to account for how he was spending his time at the time of the murder.
Luckily, he had good enough luck/lawyer/whatever that he remained free. I was at a cafe near the base one time and I heard a couple of deputies/cops discussing the case. Their take? They knew it was him, they just couldn't get enough evidence together to convict.
Fast forward a year later, they found the guy that really did it.
Moral of the story--if she's sleeping around, her husband is likely not the only person she's pissed off. Oh, and cop "instinct" is why we need very picky, painstakingly applied laws about collection and use of evidence.
Liberty uber alles.
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!
"Execution is not murder, self defense is not murder, military combat is not murder, ..."
... Perhaps you are confused by tangential issues, for example where a victim is charged with the possession of a firearm in a jurisdiction where they are prohibited.
Yes, those things are murder also. You've merely been conditioned to believe they are not
Wrong. Words have common meanings, definitions. We could not communicate otherwise. "Murder" is a word used to describe a specific type of killing, shown below. You seem to be confusing a subjective moral opinion with the accepted definition of a word. Merely believing that all forms of killing are immoral does not allow you to change the definition of a word.
murder
n.
1. The unlawful killing of one human by another, especially with premeditated malice.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/murder
"Murder is an illegal killing, the preceding are legal."
No, they are not. Circumstance is used to determine if punishment may be waived. Killing is always illegal. Proceeding with prosecution is at the whim of the State. Your State makes available the definitions of all crimes, read up on them.
Actually I've had an administration of justice class that covered where the use of deadly force was legal. I believe state statutes authorize the use of deadly force when executing a death warrant, in self defense, during the suppression of a riot,