Hans Reiser to Sell Company

DVega writes "Due to increasing legal costs, murder suspect Hans Reiser is seeking to sell his company. His lawyer William DuBois said he is running out of money to pay for his defense. DuBois added, 'This is a unique opportunity for someone to buy the company for pennies on the dollar. We welcome all vultures.' This is a good opportunity to own a filesystem and rename it after your own."

Comments

Re:This is sad ...

[mabhatter654]

he knew for several days the police were going to investigate him...he had plenty of time to clean these things up! leaving sloppy evidence like book and tools in the car doesn't make sense. The wife was also known for playing very dirty also and milking it for all it was worth before the divorce was final(the sfgate news mentioned that earlier in the case) She did the usual "husband is beating me" routine but as they described it, it was almost fake (impression from news at the time)... but of course police take the report out on the MAN's fault, and because of that HE has to move out of his house, and HE can't have the kids.. even though everybody KNOWS the reports of abuse are fake or not fully true. She was cheating on him...in his house! and he had to get a new one. She was killed when the kids were with him... that almost points to the boyfriend as the suspect or a paid hit. It's almost like the OJ thing.. the setup evidence is almost TOO good... but pinning the suspect to the actual crime doesn't fit the time tables of where the POLICE say everybody was at. It's like the ex-wife did all the hard work to set the guy up as a bad guy for the divorce, but was living the wild life with somebody else... it's like a gift-wrapped mob hit and the police are falling for it while they have coffee with the real killer at the doughnut shop.

I'm not saying he couln't have done it, but it's like the OJ case.. soon we'll be finding the police lab "embelished" some reports...mislabled where evidence came from...etc. once that happens, the police have failed to do their duty of running a clean show and you HAVE to let him go not knowing if the police lied, or just did crappy work. His reputation is stained forever, So they just bleed him dry with legal fees and call it good. Nobody gets BANNED from law enforcement for deliberately screwing up the trial!!! That's what's sick with the whole system right now.

Re:Why pay for that?

[igb]

Hans Reiser says that he actually makes some money selling the right to use his file system without telling anyone else that they're using it.

(Yes I know, but the corporate world is weird.)

I've got one of the machines that is covertly Reiser4 under the hood, I believe. I can see why a vendor would want to keep it quiet, too.

• Firstly, the admission that you don't own the filesystem (in the sense of employing all the major contributors) is a worry for many customers.
• Secondly, if you want to put your own secret sauce into the filesystem (perhaps hooking it more intimately into your product's volume management, or providing a shortcut API into your block level IO, or doing extra things for fast failover between control units, or whatever) then you don't want to have to pass this stuff out GPL'd.
• And finally, if you want to use an otherwise-GPL'd filesystem linked into a non-GPL real-time executive like VxWorks (no relation to VxFS, confusingly) or QNX, having a non-GPL version of the filesystem probably saves everyone a lot of lawyers bills.

I'm not sure I approve of this as a GPL enthusiast --- hey, I had code on the Emacs 17.61 tape! --- but as a customer I don't think I care too much. You don't get to have much oversight of the components used in products you buy unless you're entering into the wild world of source escrow, and buying a non-GPL'd version of a GPL'd product is no different to the OEM buying something completely closed, and in many ways better (I still get the many-eyes thing, up to a point).

ian

Re:WinFS

[swillden]

Linux has 129 filesystems because 129 different people think each one is the best at what it does.

No, Linux has several file systems because there's no such thing as a perfect file system, and even if there were, it hasn't been achieved yet.

Each of the file systems out there has different strengths and weaknesses. If you need maximum reliability, you need a fully journaled file system (data and metadata), but you pay for that reliability in terms of performance. In most cases, you don't need that, but it is important that your file system not become corrupted by a power failure, or similar problem. For those, metadata journaling is enough. In yet other cases, raw speed is the goal, so journaling is a bad idea.

But speed vs. reliability is only one issue to consider. Another is space efficiency, particularly for systems that will have large numbers of small files. Most file systems use one disk block (e.g. 1KB) even for a 100-byte file. Others (like reiserfs) can pack small files together. But that efficiency introduces complexity, which can reduce reliability. So space efficiency vs. reliability is a consideration.

Another tradeoff is read performance vs. write performance. Yet another is performance of small files vs performance of large files. Yet another is reconfigurability -- can file systems be grown or shrunk in-place, perhaps even while in use? That's another tradeoff against complexity and the associated reduced reliability.

For the desktop user, it doesn't really matter. You'll notice little difference regardless of which file system you choose. But there are applications in which the choice of file system can make a significant difference in system performance, space efficiency, reliability, or flexibility.

Windows has One File System(tm) because... it's easier.

No, Windows has one file system because Microsoft has never focused on technical excellence. Mediocrity is often an excellent business strategy, and it has certainly proven to be good to Microsoft, but that doesn't mean we can't have better.