disclaimer: I have no interest in the future of reiserfs3 or 4 and I've never been a user of it (although I have tried it out once or twice). I personally feel that any concepts embedded within reiserfs that are worth salvaging would be better implemented in another code-base. On Sun, Mar 07, 2010 at 11:21:19PM -0600, Stan Hoeppner wrote: > For an educated man you make many assumptions, many > incorrectly. I didn't say the code was bad because Reiser > is a bad man. I said one of the reasons I wouldn't use > ReiserFS is because its author is a convicted murderer. > This has nothing to do with code, but supporting the work > of a criminal. "ReiserFS" might mean ReiserFS3 (in-kernel) or ReiserFS4 (not). The copyright holders for ReiserFS3, as represented in-kernel, are mixed, but largely Hans Reiser via copyright assignment. The authors of the code are mixed, and it's harder to say who wrote what, but I think the majority was not by Reiser himself. (A list of the main contributors is present in fs/reiserfs/README in the Linux source tree) The copyright holder for all code in ReiserFS4 is namesys, which is (or was) Hans Reiser (again due to copyright assignment). Again it's hard to say who "wrote" ReiserFS4. Vladimir Saveliev is described as the "main programmer". There are at least seven other major contributors. > It's akin to not eating at a known Mafia owned/operated > restaurant. The food is most likely fantastic, but I > wouldn't eat there because of who owns the joint. I don't > condone or support criminality. You are of course entitled to your own moral code and values. This comparison suffers on one front, though: eating in a mafia controlled restaurant means you are directly financing crime. It would appear Reiser's crime is entirely unrelated to the ReiserFS filesystem family. Using reiserfs3 or 4 less obviously or directly supports Reiser in any fashion. There's a possibility that using reiserfs4 contributes towards it's popularity, which in turn might have an influence on the likelyhood of commercial contracts with Namesys for developing reiserfs4, which would result in financially supporting Reiser. But the company is currently suspended and unable to take on contracts and it would seem vanishingly unlikely that it will return. > Novell, being headquartered in the Mormon capital of the > world, Salt Lake City, Utah, announced the day Reiser was > arrested (not convicted but arrested) that they were > dropping ReiserFS as the default filesystem in SLED/SLES > immediately, and would be moving to help permanently phase > it out at customer sites ASAP. Obviously this latter part > didn't happen over night as it was deployed on many > production servers. Novell didn't do this because the > code was bad. They did it because religious/political > forces dictated they distance themselves asap from Hans > Reiser, especially given competent (and some would argue > better) alternatives were available. We haven't even > touched the practical issues involved in continuing use of > ReiserFS. Some might argue that they needed an exit strategy from ReiserFS (since the likelyhood of v4 being merged was vanishingly small, and v3 was largely unmaintained), and Reiser's conviction gave them just that. -- Jon Dowland
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