The tech is still incredibly impressive, I just wish they'd rename it.
That said, we also need to be able to separate the good and bad people do. Reiser in his capacity as a programmer is really a different entity to him in his capacity as a murderer. Celebrating one is not celebrating the other.
It is the stereotypical example, but it is such a good one that it deserves to become a cliche. Fritz Haber was sufficiently evil that apparently his wife committed suicide because of him. The Haber–Bosch process is probably one of the greatest technical contributions to humanity, ever, full stop. Maybe the steam engine can compete or a handful of other things. We can't allow technical excellence to be shunned because the technician had horrible problems - the shunning lessens us all. We can afford for bad people to be remembered if the price they pay is to create something of great use.
Reiser's accomplishments are already out there, there's no need to continue with his name on something he hasn't contributed a patch to in a decade, and there's literally no harm in changing the name of a program like this; it's not a binary decision between "remember the person" and "use their work," plenty of people have their work utilized despite no one knowing their name. I think that's fine.
"FooCorp will gimp the 700LC with a 30-watt power limit, ensuring it won't compete with the full-performance 700.".
They could call it rfs or something, anything but reiserfs.
Mordsschnell!
Aside: "Quick" can mean "alive" - I think that was its original meaning. We should also note that schnell is often translated as "quick" but I think "faster" is better in general. Using a simple dictionary approach to translate mordsschnell into English might come unstuck pretty quickly. With these clues we could arrive at living dead or zombie! I don't know but given how fast the above comment got downvoted that word has some history.
The ideas described in the linked email looks quite original, too. The abstraction level between blocks and files have always been a leaky one. It would been interesting to see them implemented. I guess it would require a lot more RAM to be effective but that might not be an impediment these days.
Not a great namesake, is it?
is it really that difficult to attempt empathy?
imagine being one of his kids, growing up to become a developer, and then having to work on code that intersects with reiserfs.
since kids are in Russia i highly doubt that.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/sympathy-empat...
the implication is that even though i haven't had my mother murdered i can simulate the experience and thereby relate (to an extent) to someone that has and make decisions with those insights in mind.
Edit: I just realized that what you probably meant is that if it's never happened to me then I can't genuinely be concerned. I didn't even know that that was something people believed. Interesting. Why would anyone pretend to be concerned for someone else's wellbeing?
The very first thing I thought about when I saw the headline was Hans Reiser's crime. The first thing I then expected in the comments was a lengthy discussion about that. I am fairly certain that this is fully in line with how most people react.
I don't see how your proposed hypothetical following a name change would take hold. I don't think a name change would be perceived as "concealing", just understandably moving away from a name that has become unfortunate. I think people are more surprised that they haven't.