this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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132
Hans Reiser Apologies For Social Mistakes, Comments On ReiserFS Deprecation From Prison (www.phoronix.com)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 46 points 10 months ago

That was quite the read but pretty worth it. He talks about a lot of the mistakes he made not just in relation to his crime, but as a developer, project leader, and general human being.

He discusses what things he would have done differently, and how he thinks that could have changed things not only for him but his software as well.

He mentions multiple times how much he wishes that the conflict handling and social classes he has access to in prison, were available to him in school. He ends the letter with a call to action, for just that asking people to try and affect legislation to get more youth access to this information to avoid cases such as his.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I'm glad to see that he is learning in prison, talking and working through things. This really is the point of prisons: not just a place to keep people but a place to reform them.

Anyone of us could become a criminal given the right pressures and circumstances. I wish all prisons would reform and educate their inmates and that they come out as better people who can live a peaceful and productive life.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You are wrong. The point of US prisons is punishment.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

I don't live in the US. But I would hope that eventually prisons would adopt the mindset to reform inmates rather than just keep them locked up for nothing.

That will only lead to frustration and trouble

[–] [email protected] 30 points 10 months ago (4 children)

"social mistakes"???

[–] [email protected] 65 points 10 months ago (1 children)

He did mention the murder of his wife and said he would detail his regret to anyone who asked. The rest of the letter describes the "social mistakes" in dealing with co-workers and the Linux community. He even asks that those co-workers' names be added to the credits and his negative comments about them be deleted. There's no forgiving what he did to his wife but there's at least some evidence he's changed since that happened.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 10 months ago (1 children)

He did mention the murder of his wife and said he would detail his regret to anyone who asked.

This is true - I'm reacting more to the title than the content. It's a very peculiar choice of words.

There’s no forgiving what he did to his wife but there’s at least some evidence he’s changed since that happened.

Perhaps - it's hard to tell. It still reads a lot like one of his standard narcissistic rants even as he's complimenting others. It's still all about his "dream".

[–] [email protected] -2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I'm not a doctor but he certainly seems neurodivergent based on his writing. It's hard to imagine him ever changing in some significant way and being "rehabilitated" enough to be allowed back into society, hence the "some evidence". It's might be best he remains in jail rather than be paroled.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Yeah - I mean - I don't want to get into the business of analyzing somebody's metal state but he definitely seems to have issues with fixation. But I also don't want to cross the line into saying that he's necessarily dangerous because of that. He's dangerous for other reasons though. I agree with your "some evidence" line in that he does seem to be focusing on the part of his personality that does seem to be the most dangerous - inability to manage conflict. Prison does provide for that conflict - but it also provides many rules and structures that he wouldn't have on the outside. Dunno. I have a difficult time saying that anybody who has murdered their wife should ever see freedom again at all - "reformed" or not.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Author choosing some odd phrasing to group murder and interactions on the LKML.

Edit: The letter does include "social mistake in the Linux community" but it's still odd to phrase it that way in an article about it, imo.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago (1 children)

He was not referring to the murder using that phrase though. He was detailing how he poorly interacted with others on the project.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Yes, which is why it is a little odd for the article author to include it without context, because we all immediately think of one social mistake that has nothing to do with Linux.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago

Lack of planning - getting caught by police because of chopping your wife up in a place connected to you - social mistake.

I know that's not what the title means, just all the "killer feature" jokes are afloat in my skull.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

This is the best summary I could come up with:

ReiserFS file-system creator Hans Reiser who is currently remains imprisoned in California for murdering his wife in 2006 has commented on the Linux kernel mailing list by way of a letter exchange from prison.

Fredrick R. Brennan wrote a letter to Hans Reiser while he's imprisoned in California and recently received a lengthy response back allegedly from Hans Reiser.

The alleged letter was permitted to be transcribed and publicly redistributed.

In there he writes at length from his social mistakes, ReiserFS history, to the deprecation of ReiserFS, and the hopes he had with Reiser4.

An excerpt of the Hans Reiser letter.

It's a very lengthy read but for those interested it can be found on the Linux kernel mailing list.

The original article contains 150 words, the summary contains 120 words. Saved 20%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Well, he put his brand name on it and now his brand name is synonymous with murder.

Does he know we have ext4 and lvm now ?

What did reiserfs have that we don't have in lvm or btrfs ?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

LVM has been around since 1998, LVM2 in 2003. I think he knows about it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

I guess he or she meant btrfs

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It had a bunch of features that weren't in ext3, which was generally standard at the time, depending on how conservative your distro was.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

It is still a cool thing, from reading about it. Could have some advantages of ZFS without performance penalties and complexity, if the project wouldn't die.

EDIT: Oh, there's Reiser5 .

[–] [email protected] -3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Considering he seems to be under the impression that OCR still sucks enough that he printed his entire letter, he's probably not aware of recent computer stuff , (or he just writes like he's 11, I guess?)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

Seems a bit excessive of a judgement - under the best of conditions, my cursive is an absolute horror show. Always has been, and I’ve zero need for it with any frequency.

Suffice it to say, he’s not writing under the best of conditions. If you’d like to judge the content/intent, that’s your prerogative. But the quality of his penmanship is an utter irrelevancy.