On the conviction of Hans Reiser [LWN.net]

On the conviction of Hans Reiser

Posted May 2, 2008 17:09 UTC (Fri) by drdabbles (subscriber, #48755)
Parent article: On the conviction of Hans Reiser

I've never been sure why people assumed that if Hans was found guilty, the development of
reiser/reiser4 would cease. It's all GPL, which means anyone can pick it up and carry the
torch.

One of my distant hopes is that someone else grabs up reiser4 and works WITH the community to
develop something really powerful. Then again, with all the new focus of the latest shiny
filesystem, zfs, it's just as likely that reiser4 lays a smaller roll. Only time will tell, I
suppose.

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On the conviction of Hans Reiser

Posted May 5, 2008 13:11 UTC (Mon) by Nelson (subscriber, #21712) [Link]

Just because it is GPLed doesn't mean development will continue. Someone has to want to do it. Someone has to do actual work. Someone has to want to try and work through the issues Hans started with the kernel community.

A more interesting question is since the filesystem experts do have the source code, why aren't they diving in the ReiserFS4, why are they continuing to work on their own creations, Ext4, BTRFS, NILFS, etc? It doesn't look to me like there is this long line of people prepared to take it over, part of this is no doubt due to the relationship Hans created with the rest of Linux.

On the conviction of Hans Reiser

Posted May 6, 2008 23:58 UTC (Tue) by drdabbles (subscriber, #48755) [Link]

My comment was meant to say there is no reason development HAS to stop. People's will to
continue development is a different matter entirely.

Reiser4 attempts to solve different problems than other filesystems being actively developed.
There is no doubt that Hans' relationship with the kernel development community caused a
serious disconnect, but at the same time, most filesystem development is aimed at solving very
real problems we experience today. Snapshots, better performance, higher capacities, etc.