I have been reading some dissenting voices about the Reiser4 file semantics and the problems that this will present to the Linux community. In a nutshell every file now would look like a directory and can be opened as a directory. The names in that directory are not new files but meta data associated wit the file. This is well documented by Has Reiser on the Namesys site. This change is in some way sneaky, but in reality Hans has been writing about it for years - most of us did not pay too much attention. The immediate response in the community has been that this is too big a change and should be withdrawn.
I humbly propose that this is a challenge we should face head on now or we may not have an opportunity to do so in the future. The best way for open source to fight patents is to create prior art and you can only create prior art if you have a problem to solve. WinFS is going to give Microsoft the opportunity to discover the problems that have to be solved when faced with a file system that offers rich meta data. IMHO we have to innovate to prevent patents corralling all open source development to the old Unix domain. The only way we can fight patents is to create prior art. If we are too conservative about the challenge of change we will have to be simply spectators while the like of Microsoft patent all the 'trivial ideas' around the rich meta-data semantics that Reiser4 has to offer. We should give to the community the opportunity to discover and solve the problems that using new ways of looking at files and information that we will face.
I am generally of the opinion that much of the 'innovation' in computing is largely trivial or useless from a long term point of view. A few years ago we were told that Unix was a relic of the past and Windows NT was the operating of the future - well we see the future has to reinvent that past relic 'bit by bit'. We now see that Microsoft had many good ideas but also may worthless ones and they are having to retro-fit much that had been implemented in Unix all those years ago. But it has not been a one way street, we too have borrowed many ideas from Microsoft also.
The challenge of WinFS is not that it will be so great, in the beginning, but that it give Microsoft first crack at tackling and patenting all the trivial little solutions that integrating the WinFS into an existing computing environment poses. If we faced those issues first we have the opportunity to create the prior art necessary to defend against the, mostly trivial, patents that Microsoft and other will be filing furiously. If we are too conservative, there will be no prior art to face the challenge. Whatever your opinion about patients they will stop us dead in out tracks if we do not innovate first.
The new file semantics is both a challenge and an opportunity and one that the 'many eye-balls' of open source should brilliantly demonstrate. Yes this changes the way we view a file system and what it can be used for. As other have mentioned user space solutions would be unworkable because of the huge task of getting everybody to agree on libraries and converting the huge number of applications to use common libraries - the kernel is the common library all applications are forced to use. I strongly agree with Hans that the semantics should not be removed from Reiser4 but here lies the challenge how do you write a simple file copy utility, we can not longer use a simple OPEN, READ, WRITE, and CLOSE and get a perfect copy. But of course it has never been that simple to actually copy a file - files have always had other attributes (security, timestamps, ownership).
Perhaps we have always needed a separate form of file open - OPEN_READ_WITH_META_DATA and OPEN_WRITE_WITH_METADATA (choose any name you like). This form of open would maintain the original 'file as bytestream' concept and would read all the metadata first followed by the actual data for the file. Clearly the encoding of the meta-data is left as an open question (I would prefer the meta-data be encoded in XML utf8 forma
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I have been reading some dissenting voices about the Reiser4 file semantics and the problems that this will present to the Linux community. In a nutshell every file now would look like a directory and can be opened as a directory. The names in that directory are not new files but meta data associated wit the file. This is well documented by Has Reiser on the Namesys site. This change is in some way sneaky, but in reality Hans has been writing about it for years - most of us did not pay too much attention. The immediate response in the community has been that this is too big a change and should be withdrawn.
I humbly propose that this is a challenge we should face head on now or we may not have an opportunity to do so in the future. The best way for open source to fight patents is to create prior art and you can only create prior art if you have a problem to solve. WinFS is going to give Microsoft the opportunity to discover the problems that have to be solved when faced with a file system that offers rich meta data. IMHO we have to innovate to prevent patents corralling all open source development to the old Unix domain. The only way we can fight patents is to create prior art. If we are too conservative about the challenge of change we will have to be simply spectators while the like of Microsoft patent all the 'trivial ideas' around the rich meta-data semantics that Reiser4 has to offer. We should give to the community the opportunity to discover and solve the problems that using new ways of looking at files and information that we will face.
I am generally of the opinion that much of the 'innovation' in computing is largely trivial or useless from a long term point of view. A few years ago we were told that Unix was a relic of the past and Windows NT was the operating of the future - well we see the future has to reinvent that past relic 'bit by bit'. We now see that Microsoft had many good ideas but also may worthless ones and they are having to retro-fit much that had been implemented in Unix all those years ago. But it has not been a one way street, we too have borrowed many ideas from Microsoft also.
The challenge of WinFS is not that it will be so great, in the beginning, but that it give Microsoft first crack at tackling and patenting all the trivial little solutions that integrating the WinFS into an existing computing environment poses. If we faced those issues first we have the opportunity to create the prior art necessary to defend against the, mostly trivial, patents that Microsoft and other will be filing furiously. If we are too conservative, there will be no prior art to face the challenge. Whatever your opinion about patients they will stop us dead in out tracks if we do not innovate first.
The new file semantics is both a challenge and an opportunity and one that the 'many eye-balls' of open source should brilliantly demonstrate. Yes this changes the way we view a file system and what it can be used for. As other have mentioned user space solutions would be unworkable because of the huge task of getting everybody to agree on libraries and converting the huge number of applications to use common libraries - the kernel is the common library all applications are forced to use. I strongly agree with Hans that the semantics should not be removed from Reiser4 but here lies the challenge how do you write a simple file copy utility, we can not longer use a simple OPEN, READ, WRITE, and CLOSE and get a perfect copy. But of course it has never been that simple to actually copy a file - files have always had other attributes (security, timestamps, ownership).
Perhaps we have always needed a separate form of file open - OPEN_READ_WITH_META_DATA and OPEN_WRITE_WITH_METADATA (choose any name you like). This form of open would maintain the original 'file as bytestream' concept and would read all the metadata first followed by the actual data for the file. Clearly the encoding of the meta-data is left as an open question (I would prefer the meta-data be encoded in XML utf8 forma