It would be foolish to support this effort, considering the reckless and uncivilized nature of one of its felonious founders. Someone like this should be kept imprisioned for 20 years, but they're white like me, they get off with a slap on the wrist and back to situation normal. When they double-cross investors, sue partners or get arrested again for stalking customers, don't play shocked.
It's code with an MIT/BSD license. If you like it, use it. If not, find something else. The people behind it have very little power over you.
Ideologically open source is supposed to be above this kind of personal stigma. You can be ugly, smelly, paraplegic, Gypsy, Swedish, psychotic, a former inmate, a Nazi doctor or a toothless dog, and your patches and projects will still be evaluated the same. (I realize the real world is never quite like this.)
(That said, I think this is indeed a commercial venture. It's an undertaking by iXsystems, who provide support for BSD-based systems and are major developers for PC-BSD, FreeNAS and FreeBSD.)
It's completely fair when they're selling themselves as leaders for change. They are clearly trying to set an example, give presentations, recruit users/contributors and so on.
PS: Would you trust Hans Reiser? Answer: no.
Compartmentalizing behavior is how we function in society. It's the reason why people can simultaneously hold seemingly vile religious (or other) beliefs while still being good-natured people.
Why the hell do you keep saying "Paul Reiser"? It really makes me think you have no idea what you're talking about. No, I wouldn't trust Hans Reiser as a person. But he's in prison, so I'll never work with him, anyway. I certainly might trust his views on file systems, though.
It's completely fair when they're selling themselves as leaders for change. They are trying to set an example, in all regards, give presentations and so on.
They're trying to set a technical example. They're not selling themselves as "leaders" for anything, that's just you projecting your insecure vigilantism on things.
Let it go. I won't argue with you further, anyway.
Unlike a lot of other commenters, I do believe stuff like this matters in the context of NextBSD, especially if you're using this software for commercial purposes -- for a variety of reasons.
Please stop with this holier-than-thou nonsense. You are not the authority to determine who has served their debt and who hasn't. In fact, you have done nothing in this entire thread but poison the well.
Code is only one piece of a project, and can't be divorced from the users and community, because living code is an evolving conversation about human description mapping to system behavior.
I'm disappointed that you aren't interested in advancing the state of the art, and are instead standing on a soap box proclaiming which projects should be damned instead. Shame on you.
Some crimes are worse than others, especially systematically harassing tenants (Macy) and murder (Reiser).
It's the person whom stands on a soapbox preaching "new" technologies, whom is also an excon and got off easy, whom should worry, not those whom mention evidence for untrustworthiness.
Oh. Your position just became a lot clearer.
At a minimum, he's a criminal sociopath who would correctly flunk the background check at a minimum wage fast food restaurant. Maybe ethics and morality and character don't matter to you when you install software, but they sure do matter to me when I install init systems.
Others quick to defend by attacking the messenger damaging their precious worldview is cognitive dissonance at work, but they should get their facts straight and know whom they're protecting before jumping over the holes in the floor.
I agree that people should get a second chance, but only when they earn back trust, otherwise it says whatever they can get away with is okay, as long as we benefit from their other work. It's not okay.
"Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice shame on me"
Do you see how this affects every member of a society. Having a member of our society traumatized for life is not acceptable.
Hans Reiser (reiserfs) is a murderer, and I think it's hard to justify working with someone like that.
No, I don't see how that follows at all. It's hard to know these things in general. Your adding of the qualifier "committed antisocial acts" is poisoning the well.
Paul Reiser (reiserfs) is a murderer
Hans Reiser.
And his being a murderer has no relation to the technical quality of the file system. That said, ReiserFS is largely dead, and Hans Reiser is in prison anyway, so you can't work with him even if you wanted to.
Yes, I'm well aware. The leader of the FLDS still runs his town from prison, so you're wrong. For all we know, Hans is still coding on pencil and paper or on a computer.
The bigger issue: Should violent felons whom happen to produce something others value be embraced with blind, warm, happy-clappy love and trust? I think not.
You sure do have very low standards if you think anything going on here is equivalent to "happy-clappy love and trust".
The person is not the code. Working code can be used and valued regardless of who contributed to it.
Kip Macy, 39, and his wife, Nicole Macy, also 39, were deemed "landlords of hell" by authorities for menacing the tenants of their San Francisco apartment building.
There are plenty of links about Kip and Nicole's adventures:
http://sfgate.com/crime/article/Landlords-from-hell-deal-inc...
http://huffpost.com/us/entry/3468487
The combination of antisocial, stupidity and passive-aggressive actions results in someone whom comes off as the worst kind of liability.
I'll let you take Kip and/or Nicole in as roommates, see how long that lasts.
http://gawker.com/383763/freebsd-developer-kip-macy-arrested...
Definitely not somebody I would want to associated with, work with on any project or be around. Even though he has served his time and could be a changed person, one would always wonder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NextBSD
And, indeed, kmacy commits show up https://github.com/NextBSD/NextBSD/commits/NextBSD-CURRENT
Of course commit names are like the email From: field without using git's commit gpg signature features, but it seems to point in that direction.
(The five startups all found exceptionally smart and nice early employees, and four of them exited in 7-8 figure territory. One combined with amother startup and pivoted.)
It's that kind of thinking that gets people thrown in prison for 30 years for non-violent drug crimes.
He went to prison, he didn't just get a fine and community service. I don't think that's a "slap on the wrist."
But that's a distraction away from the seriousness of the crimes committed and the lack of punishment in this case. So it is indeed, comparatively, a slap on the wrist, compared to people serving much longer sentences for far, far less.
Edit: Solitary confinement is one of the worst forms of passive torture imaginable and most state prison systems deliberately abuse it on a routine basis... This should also end.