Fredrick Brennan
With the ReiserFS 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 Listing (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 isn’t typically you see any individual apologize for killing their spouse, clarify their coding selections round balanced timber versus extensible hashing, and recommend that elementary colleges provide the identical sorts of emotional intelligence curriculum that they’ve labored by in jail, in a software program mailing checklist. It is fairly a doc.
What follows is a relative abstract of Reiser’s letter, dated November 26, 2023, which we first noticed on the Phoronix weblog, 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 cause). It covers, broadly, why Reiser believes his system failed to achieve mindshare amongst Linux customers, past the obvious cause. This leads Reiser to element the technical prospects, his interpersonal and management failings and improvement, some lingering regrets about dealings with SUSE and Oracle and the Linux neighborhood at giant, and different subjects, together with trendy Russian geopolitics.
“LKML and Slashdot.org seem 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 finest judgment in the place to ship his reply. He additionally asks, if he has time, Brennan may ship him info on “Reiser5, or any fascinating papers on different Filesystems, compression (particularly Deep Studying primarily based compression), and so on.”
Then Reiser addresses the kernel mailing checklist straight—very straight:
I used to be requested by a sort Fredrick Brennan for my feedback that I would provide on the dialogue of eradicating ReiserFS V3 from the kernel. I don’t put up straight 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 could be off matter for this discussion board, however accessible to any who ask.
An in depth apology for a way I interacted with the Linux kernel neighborhood, 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 laborious on enhancing my social abilities to assist my turning 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 by “years of darkish despair” 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 sooner than ext2. The person I’m now would stat his papers … crediting them for being sooner than the filesystems of different working techniques, and thanking them for the years we used their filesystem to write down ours.” It was “my first critical social mistake within the Linux neighborhood, and it was utterly pointless.”
Reiser asks that numerous individuals who labored on ReiserFS be included in “one final launch” of the README, and to “delete something in there I may need stated about why they weren’t credited.” He says jail has modified him in battle decision and together with his “tendency to see folks in extremes.”
Reiser extensively praises Mikhail Gilula, the “brightest thoughts in his era of pc scientists,” for his work on ReiserFS from Russia and for his concepts on rewriting every part the sector knew about knowledge buildings. With their concepts on filesystems and namespaces mixed, it will 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 improvement; ReiserFS’ concepts might equally change “the expressive energy of the working system.”
