This made me so weirdly sad. I remember this guy; he was well known for being technically skilled but a huge pain in the ass for everyone to work with, and it’s weird to see how resigned he is now to his prison life.
He belongs in prison obviously, but it’s so, so strange hearing how his time being able to be a free man and just work on his technical projects that he’s passionate about, is such a faraway memory for him now.
May we all learn from his mistakes and heed his call for better empathetic communication in our daily interactions.
This isn’t the kind of content you’d find on reddit now is it?
Very interesting to read. I remember doing reasearch back then around 2005 or so which filesystem I should use on my gentoo installation and with a lot of small files it seemed raiserfs to be the best for my use case. So I started using it.
Later I heard about what the guy did and I figured I will need to switch next time I reinstall it because that guy won’t be able to fix critical bugs from inside the prison.
I love that the issue is not using a tool made by a murderer but that he’s not going to be a reliable maintainer lol
Yeah, I was a Linux user at the time, I remember 2.4 to 2.6 kennel transition, it was a breath of fresh air, filesystem wars, some people liked xfs, others jfs, normies used ext3, reiser4 with all the shit they promised, like accessing mp3 on the filesystem level etc was mind-blowing, them he killed his wife…
Yeah, around 2.2 - 2.6 time was wild. I was a lurker on LKML at the time and I remember a lot of the same. There was which crazy filesystem to use, there was Alan Cox’s huge work like memory or scheduler improvements (I still remember once he started getting it really right I started like 4 compiles in the background and then just went back to working, and it was so responsive still that I forgot about them and left them running), there were whole sagas like ReiserFS or like BitKeeper and the creation of git. Or my all time favorite… CML2.
With Jeff’s email, the thread was essentially moved to the lkml, an often less-than-friendly environment.
I remember observing things like Reiser or Bitkeeper play out in real time taught me a lot about how it’s not enough to be technically better, you also have to be able to work with people and not be a jerk about things. That’s another thing that’s great about hearing from Hans, looking back on it all now through the distant lens of hindsight.
Lol, I remember -ac kernel, it has a modified I/O scheduler or something, also I remember using some guys kennel, he went silent one time, after some weeks the guy’s wife wrote on the forum he fell off the ladder, became a vegetable and soon died…
Yeah the -ac kernels were for quite some time what the hep cats were all running. Alan Cox did a ton of different performance improvements that slowly made their way into the main kernel over time. I also remember they were way better if you had large amounts of memory for the time.
I also remember this weird little side note when two different teams were both working on some sort of device management subsystem, and when the kernel team selected one and not the other, someone wrote this really touchingly kind note to the other team. Like look, your system is perfectly good, it’s easily deserving of getting merged and it’s gonna suck that you worked hard on it and it’s more or less getting thrown away, but we have to pick and standardize on only one system. But please understand that it’s perfectly good and we’re not saying it as any kind of value judgement and we hope this doesn’t discourage you from contributing good work in the future. It was again that same kind of lesson as with Reiser or BitKeeper that you have to keep the human element in mind.
That’s really heartwarming. Thanks for sharing.
Woah so that’s the creator of 8Chan. Damn that guy has created a lot of harm in the world. Kinda more interesting than the murderer story.
Two different people. Hans Reiser is the filesystem developer who killed his wife, and Frederick Brennan was the 8chan creator who wrote to Reiser and got back the published letter.
Yes I know, I found that part more interesting than the murderers story.
Oh, I got it. Yeah, I didn’t know any of the 8chan saga.
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With the ReiserFS recently considered obsolete and slated for removal from the Linux kernel entirely, Fredrick R. Brennan, font designer and (now regretful) founder of 8chan, wrote to the filesystem’s creator, Hans Reiser, asking if he wanted to reply to the discussion on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML).
It’s not often you see somebody apologize for killing their wife, explain their coding decisions around balanced trees versus extensible hashing, and suggest that elementary schools offer the same kinds of emotional intelligence curriculum that they’ve worked through in prison, in a software mailing list.
What follows is a relative summary of Reiser’s letter, dated November 26, 2023, which we first saw on the Phoronix blog, and which, by all appearances, is authentic (or would otherwise be an epic bit of minutely detailed fraud for no particular reason).
It covers, broadly, why Reiser believes his system failed to gain mindshare among Linux users, beyond the most obvious reason.
This leads Reiser to detail the technical possibilities, his interpersonal and leadership failings and development, some lingering regrets about dealings with SUSE and Oracle and the Linux community at large, and other topics, including modern Russian geopolitics.
Reiser extensively praises Mikhail Gilula, the “brightest mind in his generation of computer scientists,” for his work on ReiserFS from Russia and for his ideas on rewriting everything the field knew about data structures.
Saved 67% of original text.
FYI, the bot only summarized the first of three pages.
