It’s so scary. I really don’t know what to think about it. I’ve met Hans once, I have very deep respect to his work, and I believe that reiser4 is the future of file systems.
I think it’s the first time ever, when open source, computer world breaks so deeply into the real life for me. I always try to split those two, having the Real Life and the Virtual Life go side by side, but rarely crossing each other.
Whenever I read about someone passing away, it shocks me a bit. It’s like a moment of change when you realize that the guy who commented on your blog, the guy you spoke on IRC for so many times, they guy you drank with talking ’bout future of the Internet or even a person you just read news posts of is really not alive anymore. It probably touches somehow my personal problem with dealing with an issue of death, but I always remember that I feel very strange at those moments.
And now, Hans, a man with the vision, a man who spent so many years to make the world a better place by introducing next era of file systems is arrested, accused of terrible thing, flattened into one event which will change his whole life and how we’ll remember him.
He might be innocent, I know. But what rings in my head is that this person, famous Hans Reiser, is not working on reiser4, he’s in jail, his wife is probably dead, his children are probably in deep trauma. It’s so far away from what should be happening now.
I hope, hope so much that he’s innocent. That she’s alive. That there was some huge mistake made by a lot of people leading into current situation, and that it’s possible to revert it all.
Yea… naive one, right? :(((
3 replies on “Hans Reiser arrested on charges of murder…”
Well, that’s an overstatement. You don’t make the world a better place with a filesystem, for $Deity’s sake.
I still hope this is all a misunderstanding and that she’s alive.
Marcoos: maybe Creator include reiser4 in Matrix 2.0…
marcoos: Disagree. It makes. Of course. There’s huge difference between Dalajlama bringing peace to the world and new filesystem.
But in both cases it is a push for the world in the right direction. If you’ll think about it, trying to find edge case, it’s very hard to say what makes the world a better place, and what is “just an computer improvement”.
Did Firefox made the world a better place? It saved tons of hours of it’s users! (by avoiding viruses, speeding up browsing etc.). So can we say that what we’re doing made the world a better place? Imho – yes!
And what Hans did is equally impressive, even if it’s way harder to understand cause it’s related to much more “core” level of functionality. He spent many years of his life to push the filesystems from 70ties, to age XXI. And I think that nobody will argue that reiser4 is the most advanced and powerful filesystem around open source now.