On the conviction of Hans Reiser [LWN.net]

On the conviction of Hans Reiser

Posted May 1, 2008 12:31 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1)
In reply to: On the conviction of Hans Reiser by evgeny
Parent article: On the conviction of Hans Reiser

This comment describes my point of view during the writing of this article (which, incidentally, was a relatively hard one to write). Graydon has a point, though, in that one can focus too narrowly on the topic at hand and miss the bigger issues. Perhaps I did that here.

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On the conviction of Hans Reiser

Posted May 1, 2008 20:47 UTC (Thu) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link]

Jon, I think you didn't miss anything here. It's not the point of LWN.net to dig into private
matters of people. The courts are hopefully doing a good job, and it's their job to make a
murderer pay for his crime, even if that clearly can't restore that life that supposedly was
lost.
LWN readers know about the tragedy and can deal in their way with what that means for humanity
- as a piece of special-interst media, I think it's important for LWN.net to keep focus on
that interest, and you did a good job on shedding the light on those things, IMHO.
General media probably fulfills the job to look at the general impact of this.

And unfortunately, nothing tells us that high-profile open source developers cannot commit
such bad crimes in their personal lives. Even if it' sometimes hard to believe, we're still
humans, and as with all of humanity, there are some of us who might lose control and show the
worst of all sides humans can show. Let's hope those cases will stay very few over the years.

On the conviction of Hans Reiser

Posted May 2, 2008 3:46 UTC (Fri) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]

Not to seem insensitive... but there are 6.5 billion people on this planet and atrocities
worse than this incident going on every minute of every day.  It's unfortunate.  And it's
ugly.  But I've always felt that singling one out and getting all reverent and respectful
about it is a bit on the hypocritical side.  And if we gave each one of them that attention
(if it were even possible) we'd all be quite insane in short order.  Best to have a healthy
and constructive "life goes on" attitude, IMO, and to be honest about that.

On the conviction of Hans Reiser

Posted May 2, 2008 6:21 UTC (Fri) by ekj (subscriber, #1524) [Link]

I don't think you did. There's no point to repeatedly restate the blindlingly obvious:
murdering people is bad. It is a loss when someone dies.

If I write a text on the impact of nuclear powerstations on electricity-prices in Europe, do I
*have* to include a paragraph or two on Hiroshima ? I don't think so.