[jj999]

We live in a world where code in the Linux kernel will rot until removal if it was commited by someone who later become a criminal and where research will simply not get done if the one that would do it don't have the right political opinion. "Remarkable" is not the word I'd use. "Banal" seems more true.

[kragen]

while presumably the emotional associations of murdererfs made it harder for it to find new maintainers, i think the bigger issue is that the maintenance had been handled by reiser's employees, and the company sort of organizationally collapsed in the wake of his imprisonment https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/namesys-vanishes-but-rei...

it might have helped if he hadn't named it after himself. though that wasn't without precedent; xiafs was also named after its author, and of course there are lots of other examples that aren't failsystems (linux, the boehm–demers–weiser garbage collector, the stl by stepanov and lee, and of course every software project named something like ZEUS or THOR)

the default is for free software to die if nobody works on it, and though murdererfs did have some users, it evidently didn't have enough enthusiastic users for them to take up the mantle

pretty similar to what's happened with firefox and chromium; the hypothetically less evil forks like palemoon keep dying off from failure to recruit new talent

[LAC-Tech]

I don't get the Zeus or Thor bit. Of course our indo-european father of the daylight sky has likely killed a few mortals. But does that really stop people contributing to projects named after him? I've been using the Thunar file manager for years...

[kragen]

the joke is that when walter mitty writes a program and names it 'thor', he is in effect naming it after himself (a wish-fulfillment fantasy version of himself), just like when linus called his versioned blob store 'git', but in a less self-deprecating way

[bee_rider]

stl get a pass because it also makes a great acronym.

[kragen]

also as far as we know meng lee has never stabbed anyone to death

[kragen]

(or strangled anybody)

[sa-code]

This feels like a trollish way of making a point about "PC" culture. Linus Torvalds is hardly a beacon of said culture already and it's going just fine

[vdaea]

When has Linus said something politically incorrect? And no, calling someone an idiot because of their incompetence as a programmer does not count.

[EGreg]

This would be a much better example since we were talking about physics / code being done by some group of people

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/11sv7gc/linux_kernel...

[IshKebab]

A little bit different don't you think? Unless Einstein murdered any people that I don't know about.

In any case they didn't remove it because of the murder.

[arp242]

This is flat-out wrong. Even Hans Reiser himself (pre-murder) had essentially given up on ReiserFS 3 and had been saying "just wait ReiserFS 4, which will fix all the problems" in response to bug reports and such for ReiserFS 3, which mostly went unfixed.

Some development and maintenance has happened after Hans Reiser's conviction, such as enabling ReiserFS to use more than one core.

However, some problems like y2038-compatibility or 1 second date resolution are not even easy to fix without changing the on-disk format. It's a right pain, y2038 in particular. And ReiserFS doesn't actually have a lot of usage, partly due to this and other problems, so why bother going through a difficult and painful migration?

It's slated for removal now due to the y2038 issue, but even with that the removal of ReiserFS is conditioned on "no one really objects and/or brings a good use case to front", similar to the Itanium removal.

It's more than likely that ReiserFS would have been in the same state if Hans Reiser has died in a sudden accident before he killed his wife.

[actionfromafar]

Oh, now I remember ReiserFS 3 vs 4!

It was like WinFS in Microsoft land. The filesystem would be the database etc.

(By the way never put an image of a reiser filesystem on a mounted reiser disk and then run fsck. Goodbye, all files.)