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The File-System Fallout of the Reiser Verdict
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."
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.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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!
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
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.
More Twoson than Cupertino
True, the other developer moved the code and patches to his server months ago when the namesys.com site went down.
Rieser 4 Patches and Programs
According to the article they are still in active development. They got patches for the 2.6.25 kernel so somebody is still working over there.
Source Article
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.