The Future of ReiserFS 459
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.'"
As expected (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:As expected (Score:5, Insightful)
Not sure if I'm feeding a troll here, but the man has BEEN ARRESTED! That is all!
If you have any evidence that he killed his wife, be sure to let us know. (and let the police know of course)
Re:They saw a murder coming? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not Surprising? (Score:3, Insightful)
If he was the only real suspect they had, and they had no reason to assume that he hadn't done it, why wouldn't they arrest him? "We saw it coming" refers to him being arrested, not to him (possibly) killing his wife.
Re:Not Surprising? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not Surprising? (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, absolutely. But most suspects don't get arrested. Suspects against whom the prosecution feels that it has enough evidence to make a strong case get arrested. Being an estranged spouse isn't usually, in and of itself, damning evidence in a murder trial. Prosecutors don't generally play the "let's just arrest everyone we can think of and see which case will stick," method.
Problems for Namesys? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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:As expected (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Fabulous quote (Score:3, Insightful)
In these cases, spouses and ex-spouses are always the first suspects.
Regardless of whether or not Hans has done anything wrong (and the public have no evidence either way), it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that unless convincing evidence to the contrary turned up, he'd be arrested.
Re:We saw it coming?? (Score:2, Insightful)
The circumstances surrounding her disappearance are so strange that I wouldn't assume anything.
Re:OS Developers arrested (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We saw it coming?? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Problems for Namesys? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think Hans might very well be just that important to ReiserFS. I've worked at companies where if a certain person died or decided that they didn't want to work there any longer, it would be very hard to replace them.
There are some tasks wherein the set of people who are both qualified and interested is quite small. This might well be true of the ReiserFS internals.
Re:As expected (Score:4, Insightful)
My point is, if you'd want to kill your wife, you'd obtain these books BEFORE you kill your wife, study them thoroughly for a long time and then despose them. Hans Reiser is not stupid. Of course it is all possible that if she were murdered by him, it was an impulse murder. Who knows. We have no evidence and facts.
Re:We saw it coming?? (Score:3, Insightful)
(*) This isn't the result of terrorism or any one particular event; it is simply the inevitable consequence of government expanding its power year after year. (The US government of today dwarfs the US government of 100 years ago, both in revenue and power over the people, but only a fraction of that growth was achieved pre-Bush or post-9/11.
Re:As expected (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"I didn't kill my wife!" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Problems for Namesys? (Score:2, Insightful)
Dear Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank you.
Re:We saw it coming?? (Score:1, Insightful)
For. Crying. Out. Loud.
Will you wake up and grasp the distinction between enemy combatants sincerely interested in attacking a foreign country, and someone who is either a citizen or resident alien (I presume) of the US?
The relentless nanny-state onslaught has produced such a bunch of slack-jawed granola-heads as to be an utter embarrassment.
Go back to college, listen to your Steve Miller Band, and keep smoking that stuff until you become intellectually indistinguishable from that plant.
</rant>
Re:Strange way to prosecute in the US (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:We saw it coming?? (Score:3, Insightful)
So the ballpart was achieved in few months during Bush that were prior to 9/11? I take it you meant post-Bush (in which case I agree) or pre-9/11 (in which case I don't).. which is it?
Guantanomo is a fig leaf (Score:3, Insightful)
Would that the Bushies could! There have been, I believe, two US citizens in Guantanomo, and Bush has made it crystal clear that he thinks he has the power to send US citizens there without being hindered by the courts or Congress or even common decency. Independent reports suggest that most of the Guantanomo prisoners are innocents picked up either because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or because someone with a personal grudge dropped anonymous hints. Such is to be expected when the process of law is denied.
Besides which, the only logical rationale for keeping the prisoners there, out of touch with any decent legal system to protect the innocent, is to torture information out of them or to keep them out of circulation. Torture has been shown to produce unreliable info; the only other reason is to exact revenge, which is not a particularly noble goal, certainly not mine, and a sorry goal for any government. As for keeping them out of circulation, a standard legal process would serve just as well.
Guantanomo has no purpose other than to make the Bushies look like they are doing something useful.
Dear Slashdot Reader (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank you.
Re:Life outside of coding (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We saw it coming?? (Score:3, Insightful)
There is no fucking difference.
Both citizens and non-citizens, even enemy combatants, are human beings.
The Bill of Rights is supposed to be a partial list of rights which are supposed to be accorded to all humans.
If you are willing to compromise your principles in certain situations, you don't have principles.
Re:Problems for Namesys? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow. Either Hans is much nuttier than I thought (I thought he was just a bit of an egotist) or he managed to get into business with someone who was really awful. That story is on the edge of nutty, but it's just plausible enough to not be completely dismissable.
"Death Yoga" is a little out there though. I've seen references to the idea, but it seems a bit much for someone to demand that a business partner commit suicide in a particularly weird and unusual (and possibly impossible) way. Claiming it seems paranoid and delusional.
Anyway, the employees could just quit Namesys and form their own company that does the same thing. I'm sure that the people who made business arrangements with Namesys would understand the situation.
Re:We saw it coming?? (Score:3, Insightful)
The thing that bothers me most is that people are willing to accept that "many" of the people there are scum. How do you know? Honestly how does anybody know unless they are trusting the president 100%. He is the only arbiter, he points to a picture or a list of people, utters the phrase "bad men" and it's a done deal. No courts, no trials, no evidence, no nothing. The president says so and therefore it must be so.
Re:As expected (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:We saw it coming?? (Score:3, Insightful)
What a jackass! What were they supposed to do - arrest him before she was officially declared missing? And although I have no information about the supposed crime, wouldn't an estranged husband almost automatically be the most likely suspect in her disappearance?
I don't have anything against Reiser. However, while this has to be incredibly frustrating for him (assuming he truly is innocent), I don't see what police course of action would have been more justified.
Re:Can he continue to work? (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't people in prison generally have at least some free time? Time to keep a journal, or write a book? Or read a book?
What about letters?
This is not the point.
Contrary to popular belief, no healthy programmer spends 100% of their free time coding. They go out for beer, or for a walk. They do things online other than work on their own project.
Give Hans a computer and an Internet connection. Filter the hell out of that connection -- email only, and only on the reiserfs lists. Web restricted to distro updates and kernel.org. Is that really so different than giving him a pen and some paper and letting him write a book?
It certainly won't mean he isn't punished. And punishment isn't always the real point of prison -- if he gets life, it means he won't be able to kill again. Internet connections won't change that.
Re:Probable Cause (Score:3, Insightful)
People generally ignore potential consequences that can only theoretically happen to them. Look how many people continue to smoke ("yes yes, I know it causes cancer but my Uncle Dudley smoked a thousand packs a day and lived to be a hundred and seventy so it won't happen to me") when they absolutely do know better. Human beings are, at the core, not rational animals. We are rationalizing creatures who, except in rare cases, require substantial training to become rational ones.
We are remarkably efficient at finding reasons to do what we want to do even when we know we shouldn't, and are even better at justifying to ourselves doing absolutely nothing when there's every reason to believe that we should do something. I can't see such a fundamental defect in human nature correcting itself in the near future, so I'm not sanguine about our ever deciding that we've had enough.
And if we do
Re:Some Related Reading (Score:1, Insightful)