[codazoda]

> NB: Please don't discuss the personalities involved.

Ah, but that's all I can think about when I read about reiserfs. For anyone who is unaware, the author, Hans Reiser, killed his wife and hid her body. There was a long and public investigation and he was found guilty. He later produced her body as part of a plea deal.

[Beltalowda]

It's unfortunate that ReiserFS is named after Hans Reiser; other people were working on it too (well before the murder, see e.g. [1] for a crude overview), and there's nothing stopping anyone from maintaining and developing it, no matter what Hans Reiser did. Yet in large part due to the name, it's strongly linked to him :-/ If Theodore Ts'o would have been convicted of murder the ext* filesystems probably would have lived on, as it's not "TsoFS".

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20060318185107fw_/http://www.nam...

[not2b]

I worked with Hans Reiser before he want off to Russia to found his company in Russia (we were at an EDA company, not on the same project but in the same small group). ReiserFS was very much his vision, the core ideas were his, so the names are appropriate. Most of those other people you mention were once his employees. He was very driven, and at first he struggled to explain his ideas. I didn't want to believe that he killed his wife, though I knew he was very troubled and tended to see people as tools.

[pdmccormick]

I can still remember discussing the case while hanging around the student union office at school. I wanted to believe he didn't do it, in part because there would be a chance that the children might be reunited with their mother, and also because of a youthful naivety about the supposed honesty and integrity of someone of strong technical competence and achievement. I had been running reiserfs for years already by that point so I definitely had the "my team" bias. It's a sobering lesson that I continue to reflect upon to this day.

[ip26]

I feel like there's a small tautology here- who is most likely to name the software package after themselves? A narcissist, of course, and narcissism is a component of sociopathy.

[karteum]

So you also think Linus Torvalds is a narcissist ? And every people who name their project or company after their names are potential sociopaths ? What about all scientists who gave their names to the effects or law of physics (or math formulas) they discovered... ?

[int_19h]

Linus didn't name Linux after himself, another person who distributed it named it after him.

Scientists also generally don't name their discoveries after themselves. The honor of getting someone named after yourself is something that your colleagues are supposed to bestow in recognition of achievements - sometimes long after the person in question is long dead.

[Beltalowda]

That seems like overthinking things. I've named things after myself (and also other people), and I'm neither a narcissist nor sociopath. It just sounded nice.

[blablabla123]

Yeah that's also why I stopped using it. Why didn't they just fork it and change the name? I don't get it.

FWIW at some point it also had quite severe stability issues. I'm sure those were solved but that might have contributed to the fact why there was no effort to fork it but instead people went with ZFS, XFS and eventually ext4

[daneel_w]

Does superficial moralism and applying guilt by association somehow improve your life?

[selfhoster11]

There is no need to over-analyze this. It's perfectly legitimate to feel that it's weird to use an FS created by someone who murdered his wife, or otherwise violated or opposed norms that you hold important. For instance, I certainly wouldn't use something called HitlerOS as my daily driver (or at all), no matter how good it was, because the name itself makes me uncomfortable.

[hulitu]

Then i should not use a linux system because it contains code from NSA, Google, Facebook, Apple or even Microsoft. That's not a reason not to use a system. The US was more than happy to use things created by german war criminals ( V2).

[selfhoster11]

> That's not a reason not to use a system.

If you care about those things very deeply, then perhaps that is exactly the right thing to do. Lots of people don't do things because of ideological or personal beliefs, even if it limits their options.

[blablabla123]

Many people use the BSDs for their transparency and despite Linux catching up in many areas, BSDs (which are arguably more political) have a rock solid reputation. (Maybe that's why all of Apple's flagship products are based on BSD - never heard of them using Linux though) IMHO people forget that software development is of course about the tech but really half of the work is about people, both in Opensource and Commercial developments. Large orgs think twice before they use a (perhaps free) software with bad reputation

[daneel_w]

There's no need to overreact about it either; no need to judge the book by its cover. To use your example, some people are having allergic reactions to the software as if it were named HitlerFS. The conflation is exaggerated. Dismissing great software because it was named after a man who would years later murder someone won't bring the victim back. It just eaves the world with less great software. Pointless and misguided moralism.

[selfhoster11]

As I pointed out, this is not moralism. Humans aren't cold, calculating logic machines. We have emotions, and we care about our social standing.

If I choose to use a slightly inferor alternative because the name makes me uncomfortable, that is perfectly legitimate.

If using ReiserFS costs me a number of weirdness tokens (like using it in a workplace, and the relevant decision makers are likely to know about the murder now or in the future), then I may choose not to use it to conserve those tokens for other controversial initiatives that I care about even more.

Neither of those decisions may be "rational", but it's also not moralising. I simply have to take a complicated social/emotional calculus into account, something that most do unconsciously 24/7 without thinking "hmm, today I shall get on my moral high horse and decide that this is moral and the other thing isn't".

[hbn]

Props to you for pulling out the quote were he specifically said to not talk about that, and keep discussion about the APIs, proving that you read it, and then bring it into the thread anyway to derail it with the brutal murder topic.

[cthalupa]

HN is not the kernel mailing list, and the range of topics discussed on here are significantly wider than that of the mailing list. If we restricted ourselves to the same rules, there's not many posts on the front page that would be allowed.

Sometimes we have no choice as to whether or not we can use the work of someone who has done bad things - Einstein was quite awful to his wife, for example, but it's not practical to ditch relativity just because he sucked on a personal level. But there's plenty of replacement filesystems - should there be no discussion as to whether or not we should weigh the moral issues alongside the technical ones?

[thrill]

He's not discussing it on LKML, nor did he hijack someone's thread here on HN.