Hans Reiser to Sell Company 583
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."
Why pay for that? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is sad ... (Score:3, Interesting)
After all, if YOU LOOSE, you have to pay the government court costs.
I know its like this for small petty charges in au, or is USA run by evil lawyers?
Give the money to his kids (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This is sad ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is sad ... (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:Prosecute murder with no body? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
It's entirely possible to make a conviction based on circumstantial evidence, such as the suspect having a strong motive (like opening a new life insurance policy on the victim) or finding evidence of intent (such as plans or a list of supplies for committing the murder) after the victim's disappearance. There could also be physical evidence to indicate that the victim had sustained non-survivable injuries, such as finding that the victim bled a fatal amount of blood in the suspect's house.
Also, as you pointed out, convictions have been made based on witnesses to and evidence of body disposal. I don't remember the exact case, but it involved the victim's body being put into a large cooler, carried onto a boat (this was observed by a witness), and dumped at sea. The cooler was also dumped, and the suspects shot holes in it in an effort to make it sink. However, it floated, and was found by a fisherman, who decided it was a perfectly good cooler, even though it had bullet holes in it, was missing its lid, and was covered in what he thought was fish blood. When investigators asked around about the cooler, the fisherman turned it over to them. I think they may have found some traces of the victim's blood in it, and they could tie it to the witness who saw the suspects carrying it onto their boat. They got a conviction in that case.
(IANAL, IANACSI)
Re:This is sad ... (Score:1, Interesting)
A good friend of mine that teaches law at Duke (he has an EE degree which is why he keeps-up with Linux) has the theory that it was a setup by the wife. He said that in fifteen years as a prosecutor in Durham, NC (which has a high murder rate), not once did he ever see a murder case this straight forward. He just doesn't believe anyone would leave such a large collection of varied damning evidence in their car.
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.
Re:This is sad ... (Score:3, Interesting)
I suspect he did it myself, but I'm willing to wait for the outcome of a trial to find out.
In truth, though I think OJ was guilty, I also think the verdict was a just one. The LA police completely flubbed the whole thing. I think they tried to frame a guilty man in large part because of the color of his skin, but also because of an attitude just like yours. They weren't willing to wait for a trial.
So, though I have my opinion here, he needs to convicted by a jury who has heard all the evidence before I will treat it as fact. Our legal system exists for a reason.
It truly is sad that OJ would've been convicted, even with the LA police's botching, if he hadn't had a ton of money. Nobody should've been convicted after they messed with the evidence in the way they did.
Re:WinFS (Score:0, Interesting)
MS failed to provide a file system, ReiserFS, however, is a reality, and can do prettymuch what MS advertised with WinFS. MS would be stupid not to take this opertunity to at least try to buy up a good file system, granted the first things they would to is remove compatibilty with it, so it would be totally propeitary, and no one could fork off the old GPLed sourced and be compatible with Windows or WinFS.
I dont think anyone could deny that this is a golden opertunity for MS.
Ironically, the hidden word is Plaque, god i hope MS dosent buy ReiserFS.
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?
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
Jury selection... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:WinFS (Score:3, Interesting)
What I'd like to see (Score:3, Interesting)
You're missing the word "presumed" (Score:3, Interesting)
Question: what was the highest mountain in the world before Everest was discovered?
Answer: Everest was the highest. We just didn't know it yet.
People are not innocent before proven guilty. They are presumed innocent by the justice system until proven guilty. Before the proof, they may be guilty or innocent, and a trial doesn't change that. (In fact, trials never find anyone "innocent"; they only find people "not guilty", and the presumption of innocence does the rest.)
One might think OJ was guilty, but the justice system must presume he was innocent because he was not legally proven guilty.
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.