Convicted assassin, filesystem creator writes of regrets to Linux record
Fredrick Brennan
With the ReiserFS just lately thought-about obsolete and slated for removal from the Linux kernel entirely, Fredrick R. Brennan, font designer and (now regretful) founding father of 8chan, wrote to the filesystem’s creator, Hans Reiser, asking if he needed to answer to the dialogue on the Linux Kernel Mailing Record (LKML).
Reiser, 59, serving a potential life sentence in a California jail for the 2006 homicide of his estranged spouse, Nina Reiser, wrote again with greater than 6,500 phrases, which Brennan then forwarded to the LKML. It is not usually you see anyone apologize for killing their spouse, clarify their coding selections round balanced bushes versus extensible hashing, and recommend that elementary colleges supply the identical sorts of emotional intelligence curriculum that they’ve labored via in jail, in a software program mailing record. It is fairly a doc.
What follows is a relative abstract of Reiser’s letter, dated November 26, 2023, which we first saw on the Phoronix blog, and which, by all appearances, is genuine (or would in any other case be an epic little bit of minutely detailed fraud for no explicit motive). It covers, broadly, why Reiser believes his system failed to realize mindshare amongst Linux customers, past the obvious motive. This leads Reiser to element the technical prospects, his interpersonal and management failings and growth, some lingering regrets about dealings with SUSE and Oracle and the Linux group at giant, and different subjects, together with trendy Russian geopolitics.
“LKML and Slashdot.org appear to be cheap locations to ship it (as of 2006)”
In a canopy letter, Reiser tells Brennan that he hopes he can use OCR to import his prolonged letter and asks him to make use of his greatest judgment in the place to ship his reply. He additionally asks, if he has time, Brennan would possibly ship him data on “Reiser5, or any attention-grabbing papers on different Filesystems, compression (particularly Deep Studying based mostly compression), and many others.”
Then Reiser addresses the kernel mailing record instantly—very instantly:
I used to be requested by a form Fredrick Brennan for my feedback that I’d supply on the dialogue of eradicating ReiserFS V3 from the kernel. I don’t submit instantly as a result of I’m in jail for killing my spouse Nina in 2006.
I’m very sorry for my crime–a correct apology can be off subject for this discussion board, however out there to any who ask.
An in depth apology for a way I interacted with the Linux kernel group, and a few historical past of V3 and V4, are included, together with descriptions of what the technical points had been. I’ve been attending jail workshops, and dealing onerous on enhancing my social abilities to assist my changing into much less of a hazard to society. The person I’m now would do issues very otherwise from how I did issues then.
ReiserFS V3 was “our first filesystem, and in doing it we made errors, as a result of we did not know what we had been doing,” Reiser writes. He labored via “years of darkish melancholy” to get V3 as much as the efficiency speeds of ext2, however regrets how he celebrated that milestone. “The person I used to be then offered papers with benchmarks exhibiting that ReiserFS was quicker than ext2. The person I’m now would stat his papers … crediting them for being quicker than the filesystems of different working methods, and thanking them for the years we used their filesystem to write down ours.” It was “my first critical social mistake within the Linux group, and it was fully pointless.”
Reiser asks that a variety of individuals who labored on ReiserFS be included in “one final launch” of the README, and to “delete something in there I may need mentioned about why they weren’t credited.” He says jail has modified him in battle decision and along with his “tendency to see folks in extremes.”
Reiser extensively praises Mikhail Gilula, the “brightest thoughts in his technology of pc scientists,” for his work on ReiserFS from Russia and for his concepts on rewriting every little thing the sphere knew about knowledge constructions. With their concepts on filesystems and namespaces mixed, it could be “a very powerful refactoring of code ever.” His analogy on the time, Reiser wrote, was Adam Smith’s concepts of how roads, waterways, and free commerce affected civilization growth; ReiserFS’ concepts may equally change “the expressive energy of the working system.”