Huh. For some reason, I thought he died a while ago.
No, that was his wife.
For the uninitiated: his wife was murdered by him.
The guy had a friend who admitted to 8 murders and he himself murdered his wife who was the translator for a Russian mail order bride catalogue… Woah. Its hard to believe a person like that could contribute to open source.
You are discussing on a platform created by a man who praises people like Lenin & Castro. Richard Stallman resigned over some comments on Epstein victims. Free software is like that sometimes.
Free software is like that sometimes.
Anything is like that. The inventors of a great many things weren’t good people. Just because people do great things, doesn’t mean they are great people. Nazi doctors found out a lot about the human body by torturing them and/or treating them inhumanely. Probably a lot was discovered during the torture of humans and ignoring human rights (which probably didn’t exist at that time).
Closed source software isn’t better. It’s run by people who devalue their workers, other humans, and in fact the entire world except people like them.
Nazi doctors found out a lot about the human body by torturing them and/or treating them inhumanely.
That is a myth. The documentation left behind by them had little to no scientific rigor, and basically nothing of value was gained from it. The situation was even worse on the Japanese side, where even the visiting nazis thought they were going too far and, again, nothing of value was gained.
Removed by mod
If you aren’t far left then you are far right!
Also, these leaders have little in common and I don’t know where you got the idea Mussolini is a western hero
Removed by mod
How is Hitler a hero? Or Biden anyone else on there don’t know do won’t comment.
How petty - I’m surprised the kernel team allowed that crap in the first place. This should have been changed the day that murderer was convicted.
The kernel isn’t a place to play politics. You can’t just yank a component out like that on short notice, even if it has such a horrible story attached to it.
Back then, ReiserFS was mildly popular and its use would have been widespread (that includes me). The users of ReiserFS and probably even the other kernel devs had no idea that Hans Reiser was capable of such a crime. Infact, he was known as a computer prodigy back then.
There are plenty of users who don’t have the luxury of migrating data on a short notice to a different filesystem. Disabling the filesystem would have left them high and dry. That’s why the devs gave it a long deprecation period.
No need to change something if there’s no reason to. A murderer of wife he may be, but that wouldn’t change what happened in the project. It’s also possible that since it wasn’t all that popular outside of memes nobody even checked.
It’s a readme. You don’t need a huge reason to remove bs like this. Using documentation in the kernel source tree to air grievances shouldn’t be allowed.
The primary job of the kernel maintainer is to be a technical gatekeeper, not a social one.
It is fine to have standards for submission, including asking things like READMEs to be free of politics. They could have rejected the original commit for that reason. Even these kinds of policies are difficult to apply uniformly and fairly.
That said, the original text was a bit mean spirited but pretty harmless, especially for people unfamiliar with the internal project drama. It looks a lot worse through the lens of knowing that he is a murderer.
What I asking is that it not become anybody’s job to retroactively edit the kernel history for social reasons. Why would this README need to be modified or removed after being accepted?
Who makes the decision for what gets changed and to what? For what reason? Should the project have changed the name of the filesystem once it was clear it was named after a murderer? Are we all complicit in that crime for having this code on our computers?
My point is exactly that the kernel is not a library.
Removing ReiserFS because of its lack of maintenance and future relevance is good kernel maintenance. Rewriting the README like it is a Wikipedia article is not.
