This made me so weirdly sad. I remember this guy; he was well known for being technically skilled but a huge pain in the ass for everyone to work with, and it’s weird to see how resigned he is now to his prison life.
He belongs in prison obviously, but it’s so, so strange hearing how his time being able to be a free man and just work on his technical projects that he’s passionate about, is such a faraway memory for him now.
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With the ReiserFS recently considered obsolete and slated for removal from the Linux kernel entirely, Fredrick R. Brennan, font designer and (now regretful) founder of 8chan, wrote to the filesystem’s creator, Hans Reiser, asking if he wanted to reply to the discussion on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML).
It’s not often you see somebody apologize for killing their wife, explain their coding decisions around balanced trees versus extensible hashing, and suggest that elementary schools offer the same kinds of emotional intelligence curriculum that they’ve worked through in prison, in a software mailing list.
What follows is a relative summary of Reiser’s letter, dated November 26, 2023, which we first saw on the Phoronix blog, and which, by all appearances, is authentic (or would otherwise be an epic bit of minutely detailed fraud for no particular reason).
It covers, broadly, why Reiser believes his system failed to gain mindshare among Linux users, beyond the most obvious reason.
This leads Reiser to detail the technical possibilities, his interpersonal and leadership failings and development, some lingering regrets about dealings with SUSE and Oracle and the Linux community at large, and other topics, including modern Russian geopolitics.
Reiser extensively praises Mikhail Gilula, the “brightest mind in his generation of computer scientists,” for his work on ReiserFS from Russia and for his ideas on rewriting everything the field knew about data structures.
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FYI, the bot only summarized the first of three pages.