That was quite the read but pretty worth it. He talks about a lot of the mistakes he made not just in relation to his crime, but as a developer, project leader, and general human being.
He discusses what things he would have done differently, and how he thinks that could have changed things not only for him but his software as well.
He mentions multiple times how much he wishes that the conflict handling and social classes he has access to in prison, were available to him in school. He ends the letter with a call to action, for just that asking people to try and affect legislation to get more youth access to this information to avoid cases such as his.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
ReiserFS file-system creator Hans Reiser who is currently remains imprisoned in California for murdering his wife in 2006 has commented on the Linux kernel mailing list by way of a letter exchange from prison.
Fredrick R. Brennan wrote a letter to Hans Reiser while he’s imprisoned in California and recently received a lengthy response back allegedly from Hans Reiser.
The alleged letter was permitted to be transcribed and publicly redistributed.
In there he writes at length from his social mistakes, ReiserFS history, to the deprecation of ReiserFS, and the hopes he had with Reiser4.
An excerpt of the Hans Reiser letter.
It’s a very lengthy read but for those interested it can be found on the Linux kernel mailing list.
The original article contains 150 words, the summary contains 120 words. Saved 20%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Well, he put his brand name on it and now his brand name is synonymous with murder.
Does he know we have ext4 and lvm now ?
What did reiserfs have that we don’t have in lvm or btrfs ?
LVM has been around since 1998, LVM2 in 2003. I think he knows about it.
“social mistakes”???
Author choosing some odd phrasing to group murder and interactions on the LKML.
Edit: The letter does include “social mistake in the Linux community” but it’s still odd to phrase it that way in an article about it, imo.
He was not referring to the murder using that phrase though. He was detailing how he poorly interacted with others on the project.
Lack of planning - getting caught by police because of chopping your wife up in a place connected to you - social mistake.
I know that’s not what the title means, just all the “killer feature” jokes are afloat in my skull.
That’s a funny way to say murder.
It’s not. He was very explicitly not talking about his murder there.
