Fredrick Brennan
With the ReiserFS not too long ago thought-about out of date and slated for removing from the Linux kernel totally, Fredrick R. Brennan, font designer and (now regretful) founder of 8chan, wrote to the filesystem’s creator, Hans Reiser, asking if he wished to reply to the dialogue on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML).
Reiser, 59, serving a possible 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’s not usually you see any person apologize for killing their spouse, clarify their coding selections round balanced bushes versus extensible hashing, and counsel that elementary colleges supply the identical sorts of emotional intelligence curriculum that they’ve labored by in jail, in a software program mailing list. It’s 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 bit of minutely detailed fraud for no specific purpose). It covers, broadly, why Reiser believes his system failed to acquire mindshare amongst Linux customers, past the obvious purpose. This leads Reiser to element the technical potentialities, his interpersonal and management failings and growth, some lingering regrets about dealings with SUSE and Oracle and the Linux neighborhood at giant, and different matters, together with fashionable Russian geopolitics.
“LKML and Slashdot.org seem like reasonable places to send 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 use his finest judgment in the place to ship his reply. He additionally asks, if he has time, Brennan would possibly ship him info on “Reiser5, or any attention-grabbing papers on different Filesystems, compression (particularly Deep Learning primarily based compression), and many others.”
Then Reiser addresses the kernel mailing list immediately—very immediately:
I used to be requested by a form Fredrick Brennan for my feedback that I would supply on the dialogue of eradicating ReiserFS V3 from the kernel. I don’t submit immediately 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 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 neighborhood, and a few historical past of V3 and V4, are included, together with descriptions of what the technical points have been. I’ve been attending jail workshops, and dealing exhausting on enhancing my social abilities to support my changing into much less of a hazard to society. The man I’m now would do issues very in another way 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 have been doing,” Reiser writes. He labored by “years of darkish melancholy” to get V3 up to the efficiency speeds of ext2, however regrets how he celebrated that milestone. “The man I used to be then introduced papers with benchmarks displaying that ReiserFS was quicker than ext2. The man 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 ours.” It was “my first severe social mistake within the Linux neighborhood, and it was fully pointless.”
Reiser asks {that a} quantity of individuals who labored on ReiserFS be included in “one final launch” of the README, and to “delete something in there I might 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 sector knew about knowledge constructions. With their concepts on filesystems and namespaces mixed, it might be “crucial 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 might equally change “the expressive energy of the working system.”