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.'"

Comments

Problems for Namesys?

[NekoXP]

"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:We saw it coming??

[Rumagent]

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:As expected

[KutuluWare]

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

Dear Slashdot

[scotch]

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.