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Comment by anxrn | Hacker News Reader

I presume by personality they're referring to Hans Reiser, the creator of ReiserFS, also a convicted murderer.

Past HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2131221

Yes. Pretty much everyone is aware of the elephant in the room. It's just not relevant to address said elephant since it has no bearing on technical discussions, which is what the author of the e-mail thread pro-actively underlined.

Isn’t it relevant though? The sole author and support person is AFK for the foreseeable future.

Edward Shishkin has been the main maintener of reiser4 for years.

Besides the fact that other people have been maintaining it, he was sentenced to 15 years in 2008. He could be out next year.

The fact he is a murderer might not be relevant to the discussion per-se but his unavailability to help fixes/improvements to be made is a big issue as the author of the FS.

I don't know anything about it and whether other contributors are able to give as much input as he could but judging by the comments of unfixed bugs and few commits, it would sound like it is a big risk of stagnation. No?

It is not like he would be the only person capable of contributing into it ever.

Everyone understands the implications for a piece of software when its principal developer disappears. Wallowing in the details won't change anything. It's been years already.

Anything to prevent them from changing the name of the filesystem?

Why erase history? It happened, and it's interesting.

Entities rebrand all the time, because humans associate qualities with names. New name makes room for new associations.

Because companies may not want to be involved in a product called "PersonWhoIsConvictedWithMurder-FS".

Let history be. But rename the project to something like ChameleonFS. Hans Reiser's mentions will still be in the git history.

At my previous job, we used reiserfs. We generally referred to it internally as murderfs.

Not that I think that's good rebranding, but it did amuse us.

This sounds like it would have been a fun place to work

Honestly it was really great until it wasn't. I was there for almost ten years. The pay left a bit to be desired, but for the most part, everything else was so awesome that it was cool.

Then after some management changes, everything that made it great melted away and we were left with a job that underpays, has poor work-life balance, doesn't appreciate employee time/contributions, etc. It was still a pretty difficult decision to leave; management issues notwithstanding, the group of coworkers I actually worked with every day were - and still are - really great.

Companies associated with all kinds of crimes exists everywhere. For recent war crimes, you can search yourself. For WW2, there is even a wikipedia list of companies involved with the Holocaust. One of them even own RedHat Linux now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_...

Companies have no shame. As long as the thing increases profit, they will use it.

I've seen plenty of forks that were also renames

Even if they do this cosmetic change now, take effort deal with silly regressions and reeducating users, it will still take quite some time for people to stop parroting in every thread about $newfs, that it's about “$newfs, previously known as reiserfs, originally authored by a convicted murderer”. This ship has sailed long time ago. Maybe there aren't that many users remaining now to begin with.

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