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Hans Reiser to Sell Company
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Fri Dec 22, 2006 12:09 AM
from the will-order-bits-for-cash dept.
from the will-order-bits-for-cash dept.
DVega writes "Due to increasing legal costs, murder suspect Hans Reiser is seeking to sell his company. His lawyer William DuBois said he is running out of money to pay for his defense. DuBois added, 'This is a unique opportunity for someone to buy the company for pennies on the dollar. We welcome all vultures.' This is a good opportunity to own a filesystem and rename it after your own."
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Your Rights Online: Hans Reiser Arrested On Suspicion of Murder 1651 comments
Many readers wrote about the arrest today of Hans Reiser, author of ReiserFS, by Oakland, CA police on suspicion of murdering his estranged wife. From the San Francisco Chronicle: "Hans Reiser, 42, was taken into custody at 11 a.m., hours after Oakland police and FBI technicians searched his home in the Oakland hills. His estranged wife, Nina Reiser, 31, has been missing since Sept. 3, when she dropped off the couple's son and daughter at his home on the 6900 block of Exeter Drive... Police made the arrest based on circumstantial evidence and have not found Nina Reiser's body, [Hans Reiser's attorney] Du Bois said. 'I have no idea what the circumstantial evidence is,' he said. 'When I hear what the evidence is against him, I'll make a decision as to whether he'll talk to them.'" kimvette writes, "While the disappearance (and possible murder) of his wife is tragic, Linux users will wonder where this will leave Reiser 4. If Reiser is found guilty, will Novell or IBM pick up the pieces and finish up Reiser 4 for inclusion in the kernel or is this the end of the Reiser filesystem project? Will there be any future for the Reiser filesystem, and if Hans is found guilty and the project is continued, will the project be renamed to avoid notoriety?"
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Heh,, (Score:4, Funny)
Aero
I'll pay 10x revenues (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:I'll pay 10x revenues (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:WinFS (Score:5, Funny)
If you mean Windows should drop NTFS, purchase this, rebrand it and have it ready for Vista's release, than i think you're either trolling or a little naive.
heh, maybe Hans was in deals to sell it to MS (WinFS), but his concience ate away at him, and he ultimately refused. In return, they killed his wife, and now they get their FS on the CHEAP!
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Re:WinFS (Score:5, Informative)
The whole point of WinFS is to extend the data orginization indexing and searching advantages of relational databases to your filesystem.
ReiserFS is a great journaling filesystem, but I don't believe it has anything to do with the concepts behind WinFS. I don't know how NTFS journaling compares to ReiserFS journaling, but NTFS does have journaling already.
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Re:WinFS (Score:5, Insightful)
Dude, welcome to linux. Windows has One File System(tm) because... it's easier. Linux has 129 filesystems because 129 different people think each one is the best at what it does.
I love linux, but sometimes too much choice is a bad thing. If linux was a car, there'd be 18 steering wheels and no air conditioning, but you'd be able to change the radio stations from the hubcaps.
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Re:WinFS (Score:5, Interesting)
No, Linux has several file systems because there's no such thing as a perfect file system, and even if there were, it hasn't been achieved yet.
Each of the file systems out there has different strengths and weaknesses. If you need maximum reliability, you need a fully journaled file system (data and metadata), but you pay for that reliability in terms of performance. In most cases, you don't need that, but it is important that your file system not become corrupted by a power failure, or similar problem. For those, metadata journaling is enough. In yet other cases, raw speed is the goal, so journaling is a bad idea.
But speed vs. reliability is only one issue to consider. Another is space efficiency, particularly for systems that will have large numbers of small files. Most file systems use one disk block (e.g. 1KB) even for a 100-byte file. Others (like reiserfs) can pack small files together. But that efficiency introduces complexity, which can reduce reliability. So space efficiency vs. reliability is a consideration.
Another tradeoff is read performance vs. write performance. Yet another is performance of small files vs performance of large files. Yet another is reconfigurability -- can file systems be grown or shrunk in-place, perhaps even while in use? That's another tradeoff against complexity and the associated reduced reliability.
For the desktop user, it doesn't really matter. You'll notice little difference regardless of which file system you choose. But there are applications in which the choice of file system can make a significant difference in system performance, space efficiency, reliability, or flexibility.
No, Windows has one file system because Microsoft has never focused on technical excellence. Mediocrity is often an excellent business strategy, and it has certainly proven to be good to Microsoft, but that doesn't mean we can't have better.
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Nice quote (Score:4, Funny)
There's one hell of a joke about lawyers being vultures themselves, unfortunately the fact that a lawyer of all people said this has rendered my brain unable to make it.
Re:Nice quote (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Vultures (Score:5, Funny)
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Mising poll option (Score:5, Funny)
An opportunity for someone (Score:4, Funny)
Unintended pun? (Score:5, Funny)
This is sad ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is sad ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:This is sad ... (Score:5, Insightful)
It'll be sad if he buys his way out of the conviction when he's guilty, but we don't know that he's guilty yet.
It's saddest for you to assume that he's guilty and if he'd need to buy his way out of a murder conviction if he's innocent.
Parent
Re:This is sad ... (Score:5, Insightful)
But it's sadder to see a innocent person goto prison.
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Re:This is sad ... (Score:5, Funny)
Wait for it...
Wait for it...
Yes, gotos are evil.
Parent
Re:This is sad ... (Score:5, Informative)
Blood found in his mother's house and a sleeping bag found in his car match his former wife's
Prior history of aggression toward her which led to a restraining order.
A motive in that he has been trying to get custody of his children and they will not give them to him.
And of course this gem from SFgate [sfgate.com]:
Hans Reiser's Honda was missing its front passenger seat when police seized it Sept. 19, Cavness testified in an Oakland courtroom. After technicians removed the carpeting from the front seat area, they noticed that the floorboard had been saturated with water, Cavness said.
Inside the car, police found a 40-piece socket set, Cavness said. The tools appeared to have been used to remove four bolts that had been used to attach the passenger seat to the floor, she said.
Also found inside the car, according to police, was a roll of trash bags, masking tape, a siphon pump, absorbent towels and two books: "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets," by David Simon, about the Baltimore police homicide squad, and "Masterpieces of Murder," by Jonathan Goodman, about notorious murder cases.
All in all, I'd say its not looking good for him.
Parent
Re:This is sad ... (Score:5, Funny)
Apparently there was nothing in those books about disposing of evidence.
Parent
Re:This is sad ... (Score:5, Funny)
To be fair, it would appear that there was no direct evidence in the car. Problem is, like most ultra-super-uber-freaky_cool-keen-whazit geeks he attacked the problem programatically, and the circumstancial evidence was an unhandled exception. Talk about kernal panic!
-nB
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Re:This is sad ... (Score:5, Funny)
Are you sure? Try this Cluedo on for size: "Mr Ballmer, in the Honda, with the front seat."
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Re:This is sad ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not saying he couln't have done it, but it's like the OJ case.. soon we'll be finding the police lab "embelished" some reports...mislabled where evidence came from...etc. once that happens, the police have failed to do their duty of running a clean show and you HAVE to let him go not knowing if the police lied, or just did crappy work. His reputation is stained forever, So they just bleed him dry with legal fees and call it good. Nobody gets BANNED from law enforcement for deliberately screwing up the trial!!! That's what's sick with the whole system right now.
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Re:This is sad ... (Score:5, Interesting)
September 3rd: She goes Missing
September 8th: He buys the books
September 12th: He gets pulled over and police note he has a passenger seat.
September 19th: They impound his car, this time passenger seat is gone.
So it would seem that regardless of who did what when, he had a need to clean his car sometime between the 12th and 19th. Which is 9 + days after she went missing...
Very strange. I can't think of many fit of passion murders where it takes up to that long to dispose of a body, if it was him who did it. It suggests to me that with that kind of time, they probably will never find it. Which is a shame.
Parent
Re:This is sad ... (Score:5, Funny)
Lastly, a box containing the first two drafts of "How I did it," by Hans Reiser.
Parent
Re:This is sad ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Its especially interesting because hes supposed to be a smart guy. You'd think the last thing you want to do is purchase a book about homicide investigations when you think you're the main suspect in a homicide investigation.
Yeah yeah, maybe he wanted to know how to procede and was honestly curious in a non-sinister way. It still looks extremely suspicious.
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Re:Funny... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:This is sad ... (Score:5, Funny)
Don't forget to get rid of your Superman III and Office Space videos.
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Re:This is sad ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:This is sad ... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:This is sad ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:This is sad ... (Score:5, Funny)
Can I fork the lawyer and rename it?
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Re:This is sad ... (Score:5, Informative)
Win or lose, you pay your own lawyer fees (which, if you go with the court-appointed attorney, is free,) and any fine. The fine is *NOT* considered paying back court costs, it is a deterrent.
And you can only get your money back (and compensation for the hassle,) if you sue the government for wrongful prosecution and win. Basically, you have to prove that the government charged you when they knew you were innocent. (i.e. if they charge someone with murder, knowing full well that the accused didn't do it, because they know that the accused knows who did it. So they are charging one person with murder SOLELY to get that person to break and testify against someone else.) The trick, of course, is PROVING that the government KNEW that you were innocent. If they had even the slightest shred of circumstantial evidence, it can be hard to win one of these cases. (I was on a jury for one of these once. It was rather obvious that the government PROBABLY knew, but that wasn't enough to find against the government. The judge's instructions were very clear.)
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Re:This is sad ... (Score:5, Informative)
Please don't forget that a judge's instructions are worthless and that you as a member of the jury have all the power and the final say. You have the power to decide whether a law is just or unjust and are free to ignore it and do as you wish. Anything that comes out of the judge's mouth means diddly-squat. What the law says means diddly-squat. You create the law if you're on a jury.
Google for "jury nullification" if you want more info.
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Re:This is sad ... (Score:5, Informative)
Kirby
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Re:This is sad ... (Score:5, Funny)
A truck driver frequently traveled through a small town where there was a courthouse at the side of the road. Of course, there were always lawyers walking along the road. The truck driver made it a practice to hit any pedestrian lawyers with his truck as he sped by.
One day, he spotted a priest walking along the road and stopped to give him a ride. A little further along, as he approached the town, he spotted a lawyer walking along the side of the road.
Automatically, he veered his truck towards the lawyer, but...then he remembered his passenger. He swerved back to the center, but he heard a "whump" and in the rear view mirror he spotted the lawyer rolling across the field.
He turned to the priest and said, "Father, I'm sure that I missed that lawyer!"
And the priest replied, "That's OK, my son, I got him with the door.
Parent
Give the money to his kids (Score:5, Interesting)
sounds fishy (Score:5, Funny)
Reiser was arrested Oct. 10 after the Oakland Police Department found small drops of blood in his house and on his Honda CRX.
I'm not sure I'd want to buy a company from someone driving a Honda CRX [wikipedia.org]...
Prosecute murder with no body? (Score:4, Insightful)
What would happen if he were convicted, and then Ms. Reiser shows up?
How can you claim someone is guilty of murder before you have declared the
victim is dead? Or if the victim is dead, has life insurance been collected, for instance?
I really don't see how you can have "murder" without a body, remains of a body, or some specific claim as to how the body was disposed of.
On the other hand, I *can* see how you could justify holding such a suspect without bail, sort of.
He should, at a minimum, explain where the seat from his Honda can be found. Seems like that might clear up a few things. (They locate that seat, find it isn't covered with blood and bone fragments or whatever they expect to find... That sort of thing would be pretty embarrassing to the prosecution, I'd guess.)
Of course, if I were a betting man, my money would not exactly be riding on Hans' innocence. The car seat bothers me a lot. (The State of California is required to presume his innocence, but I am not, unless I happen to get called on his jury...)
oh great (Score:5, Funny)
those guys will buy anything if it gets them a free bit of news/ pr
the most tasteless entry? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:the most tasteless entry? (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe, but at least I'll have a killer filesystem once I get there.
Parent
Possible name (Score:5, Funny)
.
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(for Open Journaled System, of course)
How much is it worth? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How much is it worth? (Score:5, Interesting)
Talk about unintended consequences.
When your company's sole product is named after the lead developer, it makes it awfully difficult to convince anyone that there is much ongoing value in that product once the namesake is out of the picture.
Reiser may end up on death row because he was unable to raise enough funds to hire a good enough attorney. All because he named the product after himself instead of something more generic. Who would have guessed that he might pay for that bit of ego indulgement with his life?
Parent
Re:Why pay for that? (Score:5, Informative)
Provided you licensed it under the GPL, yes, you could do that.
The copyright holder has additional options, however -- Hans Reiser says that he actually makes some money selling the right to use his file system without telling anyone else that they're using it.
(Yes I know, but the corporate world is weird.)
Also, if you RTFM, you'll see that they mention proprietary add-on products, such as a file compressor
Parent
Re:Why pay for that? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Firstly, the admission that you don't own the filesystem (in the sense of employing all the major contributors) is a worry for many customers.
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Secondly, if you want to put your own secret sauce into the filesystem (perhaps hooking it more intimately into your product's volume management, or providing a shortcut API into your block level IO, or doing extra things for fast failover between control units, or whatever) then you don't want to have to pass this stuff out GPL'd.
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And finally, if you want to use an otherwise-GPL'd filesystem linked into a non-GPL real-time executive like VxWorks (no relation to VxFS, confusingly) or QNX, having a non-GPL version of the filesystem probably saves everyone a lot of lawyers bills.
I'm not sure I approve of this as a GPL enthusiast --- hey, I had code on the Emacs 17.61 tape! --- but as a customer I don't think I care too much. You don't get to have much oversight of the components used in products you buy unless you're entering into the wild world of source escrow, and buying a non-GPL'd version of a GPL'd product is no different to the OEM buying something completely closed, and in many ways better (I still get the many-eyes thing, up to a point).ian
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Aww... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:time for the linux community to intervene (Score:4, Funny)
*puts clue game away.*
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Re:who else might want to kill his exwife? (Score:5, Informative)
This whole idea of speculating over his innocence or guilt is making me practically throw up each time I see news items here on
If you are relying upon what you are reading or hearing from the popular press (even
For myself, I see a very dear and personal friend who is going through a living nightmare in one way or another. A family that is litterally being ripped apart and a couple of kids that through no actions of their own are going to be permanently scarred emotionally over what the judicial system is doing to their family... even their extended family.
This is also in a small way economically affecting me personally, and I wish I had more money to send and help Hans out so he wouldn't have to go through this very drastic step.
At the same time, regardless of what happens, Hans' life in a sense is over and he is beginning something completely new from scratch. By selling the company he is also suggesting that perhaps it is time to move on with some other completely new project or even lifestyle.
I pray for the day that Hans will no longer be a major news item on
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