Man what a wild ride ReiserFS has been. I remember when it was the mainline FS in a lot of Linux distros. Good on Hans to right some wrongs. Prison has done some good on him
Hans credits his improved social and communication skills learned in prison among other details shared in the public letters.
I thought prisons were meant to cause more trauma and help ensure people never leave so as to increase profits?
That’s only for minorities and poor people.
And mainly in third world countries, like the US.
I get the sentiment but San Quentin is not exactly an executive retreat.
Some prisons might be better than others, some people might be able to withstand the system within and work on themselves.
He is locked in California, a fairly progressive and leftist state i think , I am not entirely certain all that therapy is a good thing, i think i watched a documentary saying that psychopaths only learn from therapy how to be better manipulators and i feel like he sounds like psychopath even now.
With that said if he gets out of prison i think he should be allowed to participate in FOSS (when someone reviews his contributions), i can’t help but wonder if his reportedly unhinged behavior on the kernel mailing list was handled better (e.g. mandating he will go to therapy) the murder would not have happened.
The prisons he was in previously definitely are not the touchy-feely kind. These days he’s in California Health Care Facility, which is geared toward prisoners with significant mental health problems (notably, multiple serial killers). So, therapy of some kind definitely makes sense. However, Reiser’s been denied parole each and every time he’s been up for it (next review in 2025), so it is unlikely that he’s getting out.
I feel like it is impossible to know enough details to make any kind of conclusions. I do not think foss should check criminal records though.
So who’s going to check.
That’s why you can’t check records
i feel like he sounds like psychopath even now.
I think it’s rash to judge the tone of his writing like that. It can be a struggle to identify and admit one’s flaws, and it’s certainly a struggle for most people of the modern era to write elegantly with only pen and a few sheets of paper.
Yes, most people experience prison in the way you described. There’s always exceptions, and like someone else said it’s in California. Not a left wing state but the closest you’ll get in the US.
If the system was so great at rehabilitation the reoffender rate wouldn’t be so insane.
I don’t think it’s an American prison.
Edit: Excuse me, he’s in California Health Care Facility, which is a state prison which is geared toward patients with long-term medical needs (acute chronic diseases, debilitating injuries) and acute mental health needs (which Reiser definitely fits the profile of). He was transferred out of San Quentin some years ago.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
While ReiserFS is obsolete and will eventually be dropped from the upstream Linux kernel in Linux 6.10 is one last ReiserFS change that was requested by former lead developer Hans Reiser.
ReiserFS lead developer and convicted murderer Hans Reiser a few months back wrote letters to be made public apologizing for his social mistakes and other commentary.
In his written communications he also made a last request for ReiserFS in the Linux kernel: "Assuming that the decision is to remove [ReiserFS] V3 from the kernel, I have just one request: that for one last release the README be edited to add Mikhail Gilula, Konstantin Shvachko, and Anatoly Pinchuk to the credits, and to delete anything in there I might have said about why they were not credited.
Hans credits his improved social and communication skills learned in prison among other details shared in the public letters.
Per the indirect request by Hans Reiser, SUSE’s Jan Kara has now altered the ReiserFS README file with the changes going in today to the Linux 6.10 kernel.
The change landed today as part of the linux-fs merge to Linux 6.10.
The original article contains 203 words, the summary contains 187 words. Saved 8%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
That’s actually surprisingly wholesome. It’s always wonderful to see people really putting in the effort towards personal growth. It’s good for them, and it’s also good for everyone else.
The guy had a friend who admitted to 8 murders and he himself murdered his wife who was the translator for a Russian mail order bride catalogue… Woah. Its hard to believe a person like that could contribute to open source.
You are discussing on a platform created by a man who praises people like Lenin & Castro. Richard Stallman resigned over some comments on Epstein victims. Free software is like that sometimes.
Free software is like that sometimes.
Anything is like that. The inventors of a great many things weren’t good people. Just because people do great things, doesn’t mean they are great people. Nazi doctors found out a lot about the human body by torturing them and/or treating them inhumanely. Probably a lot was discovered during the torture of humans and ignoring human rights (which probably didn’t exist at that time).
Closed source software isn’t better. It’s run by people who devalue their workers, other humans, and in fact the entire world except people like them.
Nazi doctors found out a lot about the human body by torturing them and/or treating them inhumanely.
That is a myth. The documentation left behind by them had little to no scientific rigor, and basically nothing of value was gained from it. The situation was even worse on the Japanese side, where even the visiting nazis thought they were going too far and, again, nothing of value was gained.
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praise revolutionaries
I think you totally missed the point. I do hope you are joking. Please don’t support mass murder.
Traveling across Cuba in 1959, immediately after the overthrow of the U.S.-supported right-wing Batista dictatorship, Mike Faulkner witnessed “a spectacle of almost unrelieved poverty.” The rural population lived in makeshift shacks without minimal sanitation. Malnourished children went barefoot in the dirt and suffered “the familiar plague of parasites common to the Third World.” There were almost no doctors or schools. And through much of the year, families that depended solely on the seasonal sugar harvest lived close to starvation (Monthly Review, 3/96). How does that victimization in prerevolutionary Cuba measure against the much more widely publicized repression that came after the revolution, when Castro’s communists executed a few hundred of the previous regime’s police assassins and torturers, drove assorted upper-class moneybags into exile, and intimidated various other opponents of radical reforms into silence?
Today, Cuba is a different place. For all its mistakes and abuses, the Cuban Revolution brought sanitation, schools, health clinics, jobs, housing, and human services to a level not found throughout most of the Third World and in many parts of the First World. Infant mortality in Cuba has dropped from 60 per 1000 in 1960 to 9.7 per 1000 by 1991, while life expectancy rose from 55 to 75 in that same period. Smallpox, malaria, tuberculosis, typhoid, polio, and numerous other diseases have been wiped out by improved living standards and public health programs. Cuba has enjoyed a level of literacy higher than in the United States and a life expectancy that compares well with advanced industrial nations (NACLA Report on the Americas, September/October 1995). Other peoples besides the Cubans have benefited. As Fidel Castro tells it:
The [Cuban] revolution has sent teachers, doctors, and workers to dozens of Third World countries without charging a penny. It shed its own blood fighting colonialism, fighting apartheid, and fascism. . . . At one point we had 25,000 Third World students studying on scholarships. We still have many scholarship students from Africa and other countries. In addition, our country has treated more children [13,000] who were victims of the Chernobyl tragedy than all other countries put together. They don’t talk about that, and that’s why they blockade us-the country with the most teachers per capita of all countries in the world, including developed countries. The country with the most doctors per capita of all countries [one for every 214 inhabitants]. The country with the most art instructors per capita of all countries in the world. The country with the most sports instructors in the world. That gives you an idea of the effort involved. A country where life expectancy is more than 75 years. Why are they blockading Cuba? Because no other country has done more for its people. It’s the hatred of the ideas that Cuba represents. (Monthly Review, 6/95).
Cuba’s sin in the eyes of global capitalists is not its “lack of democracy.” Most Third World capitalist regimes are far more repressive. Cuba’s real sin is that it has tried to develop an alternative to the global capitalist system, an egalitarian socio-economic order that placed corporate property under public ownership, abolished capitalist investors as a class entity, and put people before profits and national independence before IMF servitude.
Excerpt from Blackshirts and Reds, since Parenti and Castro himself put it better than I could.
Both Lenin and Castro were obviously better than the regimes that came before them.
Let me guess, the likes of you worship Biden, Netanyahu, Zelensky and Mussolini, western heroes?
If you aren’t far left then you are far right!
Also, these leaders have little in common and I don’t know where you got the idea Mussolini is a western hero
Lenin and Castro are actual heroes, though. Your propagandistic take is just NATO support. For West, Hitler, Netanyahu, Biden, Stepan Bandera are heroes today.
Also, since you insist…
How is Hitler a hero? Or Biden anyone else on there don’t know do won’t comment.
Idk, ask west, Biden pumped billions into Israel last week and even threatened ICC openly. All of west is bouncing on Netanyahu’s wiener and cheering Israel. Hitler’s collaborators have monuments in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, and Canada even paid tribute to Nazis in their parliament.
A person like what? There’s no connecting thread between morality, emotional maturity, and programming skills.
Who is going to stop them. It’s not like there’s a gatekeeper.
Huh. For some reason, I thought he died a while ago.
No, that was his wife.
For the uninitiated: his wife was murdered by him.
Yeah, I know… For some reason I thought he died in prison years ago, but I have no idea where I got that idea
whats the recommended method of dealing with old reiser partitions once kernel support gets removed?
Kill them?
Too soon
Migrate them to a modern filesystem, presumably. ext4 is extremely reliable, btrfs is less proven but much more featureful with copy-on-write and snapshots.
This isn’t any type of surprise, ResierFS was marked obsolete some time ago now.
Btrfs is well supported and stable
Yeah, people have been saying btrfs to be untested for more than a decade by now.
I like btrfs but I’ve personally had problems. Protip: DO NOT USE THAT WINDOWS DRIVER
i guess i’m asking how do i migrate them to newer filesystems once kernel support is removed. surely i’ll still be able to modprobe it back in…
Use a kernel version that still has support to perform the copy before upgrading? If already upgraded, boot to the old kernel? Boot from a live iso that has support?
I mean, this isn’t exactly a hard problem to solve…
I guess I gotta put an old Slackware cd in with that drawer full of reiser drives.
The 6.10 kernel has not even been released yet. Support has not been removed yet. It does not have to be an “old” Slackware CD.
E: ut announcer: DOUBLE POST!
By the time I get around to shuffling through a bunch of old drive it very well could be!
Migrate now before you lose your data
Use an old kernel version (if yours doesn’t still support it) and something like btrfs-convert to get a maintained filesystem instead. Works pretty well in my experience with converting other filesystems to btrfs.
Ty!
I think I’m just gonna burn a Slackware cd and put it in the drawer with all the reiser disks.
I agree with the other commenter recommending to migrate as soon as possible while the kernel still does support, but that does seem like a workable strategy if you can’t for the foreseeable future.
How petty - I’m surprised the kernel team allowed that crap in the first place. This should have been changed the day that murderer was convicted.
No need to change something if there’s no reason to. A murderer of wife he may be, but that wouldn’t change what happened in the project. It’s also possible that since it wasn’t all that popular outside of memes nobody even checked.
It’s a readme. You don’t need a huge reason to remove bs like this. Using documentation in the kernel source tree to air grievances shouldn’t be allowed.
The primary job of the kernel maintainer is to be a technical gatekeeper, not a social one.
It is fine to have standards for submission, including asking things like READMEs to be free of politics. They could have rejected the original commit for that reason. Even these kinds of policies are difficult to apply uniformly and fairly.
That said, the original text was a bit mean spirited but pretty harmless, especially for people unfamiliar with the internal project drama. It looks a lot worse through the lens of knowing that he is a murderer.
What I asking is that it not become anybody’s job to retroactively edit the kernel history for social reasons. Why would this README need to be modified or removed after being accepted?
Who makes the decision for what gets changed and to what? For what reason? Should the project have changed the name of the filesystem once it was clear it was named after a murderer? Are we all complicit in that crime for having this code on our computers?
My point is exactly that the kernel is not a library.
Removing ReiserFS because of its lack of maintenance and future relevance is good kernel maintenance. Rewriting the README like it is a Wikipedia article is not.
Why would this README need to be modified or removed after being accepted?
It literally just was and for the same reasons I’m saying it should have been.
The kernel isn’t a place to play politics. You can’t just yank a component out like that on short notice, even if it has such a horrible story attached to it.
Back then, ReiserFS was mildly popular and its use would have been widespread (that includes me). The users of ReiserFS and probably even the other kernel devs had no idea that Hans Reiser was capable of such a crime. Infact, he was known as a computer prodigy back then.
There are plenty of users who don’t have the luxury of migrating data on a short notice to a different filesystem. Disabling the filesystem would have left them high and dry. That’s why the devs gave it a long deprecation period.
The kernel isn’t a place to play politics. You can’t just yank a component out like that on short notice, even if it has such a horrible story attached to it.
I didn’t say to rip out the kernel module - just to reject or fix the README to be more appropriate. As you say - it’s not a place to play politics and the original README did.
I’m saying what they just did should have been done a long time ago for the same reasons they did it now. It’s not appropriate to air such crap in the source tree.
Happy to keep politics out of the kernel. It was a historical record. Let’s not 1984 the past.
Let’s not 1984 the past.
Are you joking? It’s a kernel not a library.
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They removed it because it wasn’t being maintained and because there are plenty of other actively developed options.
They didn’t remove it because of any political reason or because he committed murder.
