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Linux Guru Reiser Seeks New Murder Trial (Wired)Linux Guru Reiser Seeks New Murder Trial (Wired)Posted Nov 20, 2008 22:27 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304)In reply to: Linux Guru Reiser Seeks New Murder Trial (Wired) by MisterIO Parent article: Linux Guru Reiser Seeks New Murder Trial (Wired) Irrelevant maybe, but impressive as an example of paranoia and hairbrained schemes taken to extreme heights. I mean, from the article: Reiser demands that DuBois' oxytocin levels be tested, and that if they are high, the courts should determine that Reiser was a victim of ineffective assistance of counsel and be granted a new trial.What the hell?! Where legal theories go there's hairbrained and then there's beyond bizarre, and "high-oxytocin legal counsel implies new trial for confessed murderer" is the latter. (IANAL, but I know weird when I see it)
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Linux Guru Reiser Seeks New Murder Trial (Wired) Posted Nov 21, 2008 1:50 UTC (Fri) by jd (guest, #26381) [Link]
There are two aspects to this. First, there's the PR/advocacy aspect to users, which others have noted and is very important. Linux adoption amongst non-geeks depends on better advocacy.
However, there's also another side to all of this, that being the PR/advocacy side to potential future Linux developers. Think about the obviously deluded arguments you've noted. Think about some of the heated discussions he had on the Linux development mailing lists, which sometimes bordered on the fanatical. Now think of how that is going to alter how people think of other brilliant coders with short fuses.
Then, there's the folks involved in mission-critical stuff. Think of how much trust people will have in code that (in Reiser's case) was definitely written by someone 52 cards short of a full deck, and where much of the rest of the kernel has been submitted and/or reviewed by people of dodgy temperment. Hey, brilliant minds and lunatics are hard to distinguish at times. If people are going to use Linux for high-end stuff (controlling aircraft systems, operating medical equipment, stuff that really can't afford to go wrong), what kind of extra scrutiny are they going to insist on?
(Do you really want a surgical laser to be controlled by a system written in part by a known killer? Never mind that it's not the part that would make any difference. Any medical company found using even a 101% certified safe and robust Linux-based system is now going to figure in the possibility of a media scandal.)
Linux Guru Reiser Seeks New Murder Trial (Wired) Posted Nov 21, 2008 3:06 UTC (Fri) by pjdc (subscriber, #6906) [Link] # CONFIG_REISERFS_FS is not set
Linux Guru Reiser Seeks New Murder Trial (Wired) Posted Nov 21, 2008 7:24 UTC (Fri) by oska (guest, #25556) [Link]
Sorry, I think you are just being silly. Any code that Reiser contributed is open source. We can look at the code. To think that there is 'some taint of a murderer' that is going to imperil patients being operated on by equipment which uses his code is plain sensationalist nonsense. Might make for a bad attempt at a Edgar Alan Poe type story but that's about it.
Safety-critical systems Posted Nov 21, 2008 9:05 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]
There is no way Linux is reliable enough for safety-critical systems like surgical lasers or flight control systems _anyway_. Hans Reiser's case doesn't change that.
Safety-critical systems Posted Nov 21, 2008 10:30 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
Of course the same type of media "sources" that would introduce confusion about whether somehow Linux is "the work of a murderer" because one of many thousands of contributors killed someone wouldn't consider it important to distinguish between...
- The aeroplane runs Linux on an embedded PC which provides 64 channels of streaming music to passengers. If it fails passengers will watch a movie.
- The aeroplane runs Linux on a flight-related but non-essential system. If it fails the pilot will curse it and log it as a fault, but there's a million-to-one chance of this distraction contributing to an accident.
- The plane's engines run on a mixture of fairy dust and Puppy Linux. A bug in the IRC client will cause the wings to fall off and send your plane nose-diving into a mountain.
And it's not as though they're picking on us. When car manufacturers look at using Windows embedded, the same sources will happily assume that somehow Windows will control the engine and steering rather than, as is closer to reality, a DVD player and the stereo.
Safety-critical systems Posted Nov 24, 2008 16:31 UTC (Mon) by AJWM (guest, #15888) [Link] It's not a matter of reliability, as such. For some such applications and configurations, it might well be.It's a matter of certifiable reliability. I'm not as up on the FDA requirements, but certainly FAA has some pretty strict requirements for documenting the process by which flight control software was developed, including documenting the specifications and so on, steps that harken back to the old waterfall method, quite different from typical FLOSS methodology. (It's slow as hell, but it does - when followed properly - produce reliable software (which then runs on hardware two generations old)). That doesn't apply to experimental aircraft, of course -- wouldn't surprise me if there are some homebuilts using Linux for flight control software, so long as there's a manual override.
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