Convicted murderer, filesystem creator writes of regrets to Linux list

With the ReiserFS just recently thought about outdated and slated for elimination from the Linux kernel totally Fredrick R. Brennanfont designer and (now regretful) creator of 8chan,composed to the filesystem’s developer, Hans Reiser, asking if he wished to respond to the conversation on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML).

Reiser, 59, serving a prospective life sentence in a California jail for the 2006 murder of his separated spouse, Nina Reiser, composed back with more than 6,500 words, which Brennan then forwarded to the LKMLIt’s rarely you see someone excuse eliminating their other half, discuss their coding choices around well balanced trees versus extensible hashing, and recommend that grade schools provide the very same sort of psychological intelligence curriculum that they’ve resolved in jail, in a software application subscriber list. It’s rather a file.

What follows is a relative summary of Reiser’s letter, dated November 26, 2023, which we Saw on the Phoronix blog siteand which, by all looks, is genuine (or would otherwise be a legendary little minutely in-depth scams for no specific factor). It covers, broadly, why Reiser thinks his system stopped working to get mindshare amongst Linux users, beyond the most apparent factor. This leads Reiser to information the technical possibilities, his social and management failings and advancement, some remaining is sorry for about negotiations with SUSE and Oracle and the Linux neighborhood at big, and other subjects, consisting of contemporary Russian geopolitics.

“LKML and Slashdot.org appear like affordable locations to send it (since 2006)”

In a cover letter, Reiser informs Brennan that he hopes he can utilize OCR to import his prolonged letter and asks him to utilize his finest judgment in where to send his reply. He likewise asks, if he has time, Brennan may send him info on “Reiser5, or any fascinating documents on other Filesystems, compression (specifically Deep Learning based compression), and so on”

Reiser addresses the kernel mailing list straight– really straight:

I was asked by a kind Fredrick Brennan for my remarks that I may use on the conversation of eliminating ReiserFS V3 from the kernel. I do not publish straight due to the fact that I remain in jail for eliminating my partner Nina in 2006.

I am really sorry for my criminal offense– an appropriate apology would be off subject for this online forum, however offered to any who ask.

A comprehensive apology for how I communicated with the Linux kernel neighborhood, and some history of V3 and V4, are consisted of, in addition to descriptions of what the technical concerns were. I have actually been participating in jail workshops, and striving on enhancing my social abilities to help my ending up being less of a threat to society. The male I am now would do things extremely in a different way from how I did things then.

ReiserFS V3 was “our very first filesystem, and in doing it we made errors, since we didn’t understand what we were doing,” Reiser composes. He resolved “years of dark anxiety” to get V3 approximately the efficiency speeds of ext2, however is sorry for how he commemorated that turning point. “The male I was then provided documents with standards revealing that ReiserFS was faster than ext2. The male I am now would stat his documents … crediting them for being faster than the filesystems of other running systems, and thanking them for the years we utilized their filesystem to compose ours.” It was “my very first severe social error in the Linux neighborhood, and it was totally unneeded.”

Reiser asks that a variety of individuals who dealt with ReiserFS be consisted of in “one last release” of the README, and to “erase anything in there I may have stated about why they were not credited.” He states jail has actually altered him in dispute resolution and with his “propensity to see individuals in extremes.”

Reiser thoroughly applauds Mikhail Gilulathe “brightest mind in his generation of computer system researchers,” for his deal with ReiserFS from Russia and for his concepts on rewording whatever the field understood about information structures. With their concepts on filesystems and namespaces integrated, it would be “the most crucial refactoring of code ever.” His example at the time, Reiser composed, was Adam Smith’s concepts of how roadways, waterways, and open market impacted civilization advancement; ReiserFS’ concepts might likewise alter “the meaningful power of the os.”