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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Reiser is the only filesystem on Linux that I ever lost data to. And they really should drop the name, that's not just a wish but a must, keeping it is completely tone-deaf. I was all for giving Reiser the benefit of the doubt as long as he wasn't convicted but it looked bad from the start and the way he lied about it means that that name can not today or forever be associated with something that requires trust in any form. Funny how that works. Lesson: do not name you OSS project after yourself, just in case one day you are convicted of murder.

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it's sort of self-fulfilling-prophecy to talk about how bad the name tarnishes the project, while simultaneously explaining to everybody your opinion about why the name is bad.

anecdote : I asked a young developer near me 'Hey, do you know the Hans Reiser story?'. The reply was 'Who?'. The reply came from someone familiar with the filesystem, and that general line of work.

tl;dr : Reiser is just a name. It was recently the name of a 'bad guy', but it hasn't always been, and won't always be.

p.s. I've lost data with ReiserFS too. I'm glad I don't have any need for it any longer.

> tl;dr : Reiser is just a name. It was recently the name of a 'bad guy', but it hasn't always been, and won't always be.

It's a filesystem created by and named after a murderer. Just because you're fine with it does not mean everybody is.

The fact that every single thread here, possibly every single comment, is so far referring to the name of the filesystem, speaks louder to me than your anecdote. (It's very hard, for me at least, to say that in a way that does not come across as snarky, which I don't intend to be.)

Selection bias

I think you might just be trolling, but in case you are not, I do not see how selection bias applies here. I (or anyone else) did not select any comments here. Close, or maybe even actual, 100% of the comments here are about the issue with the name, so unless you want to insinuate that the HN community responding to this is not in any way representative of people who care about filesystems, there is hardly a bias here.

How long do you want to wait? I don't particularly care about the name, but I was around at the time of the Reiser case, and I'd like to hope that I've got another 20-30 years in me yet.

However the reception of brand names is surely often self fulfilling like that, they don't succeed through robotic reason but through fuzzy associations. The murderers connection to the product is very direct so it seems it wont be forgotten soon. An unconnected product might use the name without being tainted.

Also we should rename Michael Jackson's records because he was a pedo.

Or, you know, separate art from the author.

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