Submitted by We at OSNews have tiptoed around the following unfolding story for a while now, scared we would wrongly damage Hans Reiser’s image. However, now that he has been arrested as a suspect in this case, we cannot ignore it any longer. “Oakland police today arrested the estranged husband of 31-year-old Nina ‘Nenasha’ Reiser on charges of murder even though in the month since she vanished, investigators have found no trace of her body. Hans Reiser, a man who has recently refused to cooperate with investigators, was arrested today along with two additional unidentified people around 11 a.m. at an acquaintance’s home in the 6900 block of Simson Street, according to police.”
If Reiser’s divorce preceedings are to be believed, Nina was involved with a very strange and disturbing individual who broke up their marriage and made all sorts of strange demands on both parties.
Hans seems like the type to erupt into fits of rage at times, and I don’t doubt that he can be a hard person to live with, judging by correspondence on various mailing lists. However, that does not mean he is capable of killing a person.
On the other hand, I have to admit that I harbour a concern that he may have killed Nina myself. After all, she and her new man were doing all in their power to make Hans’ life hell. I hope for his sake that he did not let his anger take control.
Edited 2006-10-11 14:47
I saw some of those claims a few weeks ago, and they really were a bit disturbing. It really put a new light on all of Reiser’s discussions with the linux developers. I’d probably get really upset with people too if my wife was doing what his supposedly was.
Anyway, I hate to say it, but it seems pretty clear that something has happened to his wife. Sadly, I think Hans may have been the one to do it. He seems to have had the most to gain, anyway.
Here’s hoping this was all just some stunt by her to screw with his mind and she turns back up.
Edited 2006-10-11 15:30
“may have killed Nina myself”
:O
I found Reiser and his language to be very arrogant and “I can do no wrong” – could that spill over to the possibility that he thought he could get alway with murder because he is ‘smarter than anyone else’ – could be.
For everyone else on this forum, as for the filesystem – goodness sake, there is a person dead, another person who is being charged, whether guilty or innocent, his life is down the toilet – could we please realise that there is more to reiser than his file system.
“””For everyone else on this forum, as for the filesystem – goodness sake, there is a person dead, another person who is being charged, whether guilty or innocent, his life is down the toilet – could we please realise that there is more to reiser than his file system.”””
If something really depressing like this happens in just 1 in a 100,000 persons’ lives on any given day, that works out to about 66,000 really depressing things like this happening in the world… every day.
It always seemed somehow hypocritical to me to get all righteous and caring over one, and then ignore the rest. But if we paid attention to all of them, we’d all go mad.
On a site dedicated to news and discussion about different OSes, I think it is quite right and appropriate to discuss how this might or might not affect the filesystems and their users.
I don’t happen to be impressed by either reiser3 or reiser4. But the filesystems are still the part of this story that are OS news.
Now I see why some distro’s have said that they will stop using ReiserFS after all these years.
It is a shame because it is a killer of a file system
It’s a dead technology anyway…
If he did do it, he could always roll back the journal.
Nah, because it’s open source it can never *truly* be dead. It seems to pretty actively maintained in the Linux kernel still.
Don’t know if this means anything for reiser4, but I’m guessing there’s enough momentum behind it to get it into the kernel regardless, and if Hans is removed from the equation it might smooth things out a bit more.
His personal life circumstances seem pretty unfortunate though. We’ll see what the legal system does.
Funny how this string of comments got modded down, whereas all the nasty jokes about killer filesystems and journal rollbacks were getting +5 on the Slashdot article.
Guess that means the OSnews readers are more mature, or maybe it was less…
I set down the threshold at -5 and I found the jokes funny.
Then again, I read fark.
/Window seat please
…might possibly be the first casualty caused by an open source agent…
Sad!
I know there is a file system called ReiserFS and the last name of the persons in the story is Reiser so I figured at least one of them is connected to the file system but the article did not say.
Try this link for the “geeky” point of view on this news:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061011-7956.html
EDIT: And I am a bit taken back at the jokes posted here when a person is quite possibly murdered.
Edited 2006-10-11 15:17
I figured the name was just a coincidence.
What a sad thing.
Hans Reiser was (is?) the main driving force and the originator of that particular file system. There are, of course, numerous other contributors, but the main design and principles are his handwriting.
http://www.idiom.com/~beverly/hans_resume.html
Woow …what a tragedy. I certainly hope Hans is innocent. Divorces and relationships-gone-sour can be quite messy. Not many people act sanely in such circumstances.
Pls: stop making jokes about this.
I agree. They should kill this thread…
agree. They should kill this thread…
I couldn’t but laugh about the “coincidence”.
Sorry.
If you don’t want anyone making jokes then this story should never have been posted in the first place. Some people choose to make light of the situation (the jokes are hardly shocking…), some people like to give an opinion on whether they think he did it and others are shocked. I personally don’t care too much, I don’t know the guy and therefore couldn’t say either way if I think he did it or not.
It would be a pity if it affected development of ReiserFS. Do they have computers and the internet in jails these days???
Hopefully she will turn up.
Just because you can be a dick doesn’t mean that you have to be a dick. A woman is very-likely dead, and while I am not personally offended by any of the jokes, they are in bad taste and blaming the behavior of others on the existence of the story is a bit silly.
I also doubt that anyone would want to touch ReiserFS with a ten-foot pole if Hans were convicted and somehow able to continue working on it–no one wants to be the company using the software being written by a murderer.
I think it would work just as well as a file system whether he murdered someone or not.
We use SLES where I work, and ReiserFS is the default filesystem. I can’t help but wonder about the future of the Reiser filesystem, in particular Reiser4. With the recent dismissal by SUSE and this news with Hans Reiser being arrested for murder, I can’t imagine a sterling future for ReiserFS.
If the filesystem does everything he claims that it can (atomic operations while still being fast) why isn’t this filesystem being used more (political garbage aside) and even if the technical problems with the implementation are unsurmountable, do any of these ideas have merit? And if so, could these technologies be implemented in other filesystems or maybe a new filesystem that replaces ext3? Or am I being ignorant, and ext3 really is “good enough”?
Edited 2006-10-11 16:15
Nothing ever gets adopted overnight, especially not in the *nix world. It’d take some time for people to believe it even if Reiser4 were bug-free, especially considering it’s a file system (the last thing you want to fail).
If the filesystem does everything he claims that it can (atomic operations while still being fast) why isn’t this filesystem being used more (political garbage aside)
As I understand it, Reiser4 was very buggy when it was first released. On top of that, you’ve got a lot of really new and different ideas in it and kernel developers have been very cautious about that. It is harder for them to understand exactly how it will fit in and what kind of new bugs this might create. It also makes it harder for them to maintain, and after Reiser dropped support for Reiser3 a long time ago that was another concern.
SUSE is discussing ditching ReiserFS anyway. I think they are going to replace it with ext3. Quite a natural solution since they have no developer left at Novell who develops ReiserFS.
I personally think there are two excellent choices of FS in Linux nowadays: ext3 and XFS. ext3 for general usage and XFS for servers. The rest of the HD filesystems don’t really matter anymore (at least one can safely neglect them):
– ext2: no journaling
– ReiserFS: version 4 won’t get accepted by the devs
– jfs: slower development cycle compared to XFS
xfs compared with jfs: almost 4x the amount of source code.
I’m in one of my “simpler is better” moods. I’m not sure what the LOC count is on the original reiserfs, but xfs gets more development because there’s more code to hack on (and therefore must be fixed).
Disclaimer: I’ve only run reiserfs on servers, and never played with xfs or jfs.
my take on XFS, and the reason I think no major distribution has adopted it as the default filesystem:
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=15053&comment_id=138993
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=15053&comment_id=139258
Here we have a case where a young woman might be found dead or alive, yet even absent of the facts, some of you have been quick to convict her estranged husband of murder. If this was you, then show some humility and be ashamed! We say, “innocent until proven guilty” in this country for a reason. For the sake of everyone involved, I really hope that they find her alive and that Hans is found to be innocent. Expressing personal feelings about the man’s work or preconceptions of his personality in a joking manner is both inappropriate and untimely.
Edited 2006-10-11 17:34
I agree.
I have no more faith in the police than Hans Reiser has. I’ve seen it too often that the police choose an easy solution to a crime and sticks to it no matter what turns up.
A few years ago we had a great scandal in Denmark with a person being almost lynched for apparently having killed a lot of elderly people on her work. The police told the media she was 110% guilty and almost everybody treated her as such. Turned out she was completely innocent. Oops…
So I’m not going to judge Hans Reiser until some solid evidence pops up.
Are you serious? Do you have any idea how the legal system works? Arresting him means the DA probably has enough evidence to convict him. They don’t just go arresting people for no reason.
Police expressed confidence that the district attorney’s office would arraign Reiser on charges for murder even without the discovery of Nina Reiser’s body.
So yeah, the probably do have some strong evidence that he did it.
It depends on the area. I know a couple people who lived around me who were arrested for a crime when they had no evidence against them. They were later let go without a trial, as they didn’t commit any crimes. The policy here is arrest first, ask questions later. I believe it even happened to a politician here who was falsely accused of illegally obtaining and using prescription drugs when they were prescribed to him… they said they were going to try to switch back to the proper way of trying to gather some evidence before they arrest in the future but who knows if they actually are.
Are you serious? Do you have any idea how the legal system works? Arresting him means the DA probably has enough evidence to convict him. They don’t just go arresting people for no reason.
Here in Canada we have a number of people who were convicted of murder and subsequently proved innocent let alone those charged and then found innocent. I Suspect the situation in the US is the same or worse. Especially as some of them are probably now dead after execution.
That he has been arrested is not proof of guilt. The police and public prosecuters often have their own agendas.
Now SuSE can claim that ReiserFS is a killer file system!
This is a very sensitive thread. It is OS related but I would still recommend that the replies would be limited/moderated… then again, I found some of the jokes pretty funny and harmless!
I usually just read the articles and don’t comment, but I pratically fell out of my chair reading this article.
I really, really hope his wife is still alive, I can only imagine how things must be for the two children, wondering if their mother is even alive.
I would hope that they find her before any conclusion is reached. Either way, I hope the investigation is fair and impartial. If she is dead, then I hope the proper verdict is reached (I have no clue either way) with substantial evidence.
Another comment: Is it technically correct to say “charged for murder” when he hasn’t even had a trial yet? Isn’t the proper term “a suspected perpetrator”?
He has been charged for murder, but he is not yet convicted for murder.
Ok, that makes sense. I hate to add redundancy to the thread, but I can’t edit my message to edit out my question.
You are “arrested” when the police stop or seize you with cause. You are “charged” when the police or a prosecutor formally state the specific criminal laws they believe you’ve broken. You are “arraigned” when the charges are formally read to you in court. You are “indicted” if the charge is a serious crime (namely, a felony) and handed to a grand jury or registered with the court. You are “exonerated” if a judge or jury declares you innocent, or “convicted” if declared guilty. Before you are arrested, you are a “suspect”, and after you are charged, you are a “defendant”.
That said, it’s very peculiar. I don’t know anything about Hans or his wife, but the news coverage of the case shows some pretty atypical behavior for the police (particularly in Oakland). They don’t normally testify against a parent in a custody case and refuse to give a rationale for it, they rarely prosecute without a body and when they do they’re typically quite specific about the rationale behind doing so. Weird.
Judging from Hans’ bio and interviews, though, I’m not the least bit surprised that he doesn’t cooperate with police.
Yet, the guestbook stating support for finding her at: http://www.ninareiser.com/ only has 45 replies. Guess we see whats important to some.
Have you tried posting a message in the guest book? That verification code is so darned impossible to read, I made 3 attempts before successfully posting a message.
After the whole Scott Peterson affair, the cops and the FBI are probably more interested in arresting first and asking questions later. The media hypes things to no ends which puts a lot of pressure on legal authorities too.
The spouse is the usual suspect when something like this happens, but people disappear all the time and unless there is some forensic or other evidence then we don’t know what happened.
I bet this story will be part of Get the facts:
Not only TCO is one advantage of MS Windows over GNU/Linux. It has been reported that being a developer of open source can lead to violent behavior.
Sarcasm aside, it’s a pitty that someone be missing and I hope justice prevails.
Edited 2006-10-11 18:32
If he gets convicted he’ll have plenty of time to program. That’s if he goes to white collar resort prison, not Federal ‘Pound me in the Ass’ prison. ( http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Office_Space )
The nick ‘Nenasha’ means at Russian ‘not ours’ or just ‘foreign’. Thats for those who do not know.
Well, as being an optimist I still sincerely hope that Nina will be founded alive and unharmed once upon a time. And Hans will be liberated out of a prison and continue his greatest work on ReiserFS.
As long as engineers are made of the same stuff that the rest of the population is with the same sorts of emotions, then there will be occasional tragedies like this (whatever the actual situation is). In the Boston metro area we had a young British hardware engineer accused of slaying his wife and baby, that was all over the media for months here and in the UK.
As for ReiserFS, I’d guess its appeal might drop off but then things are never so simple. If I were using it, I wouldn’t stop using but I might not choose to switch to it otherwise. I will study it one day despite this.
People on here just have no sense of humour, and live for the score.
I always new Open Source Advocates and developers were a a cutthroat bunch.
This accusation which I hope it’s wrong should not put the Reiserfs in jeopardy. In fact, there is no prima facie evidence that will lead to consider him as the culprit in this case, the disappearnce of his wife in my opinion is not enough to fully consider Han as the doer of the murder unless prior to this circumstance was a wife and husband violent arguments, this would point Han as the primary suspect but as long as there are no sufficient evidence Han should remain innocent.
I hope for Hans Reiser’s sake he’s innocent, and won’t be convicted. I don’t know him in any way and I’ve never read anything written by him, but a murder is a serious crime and I hope Nina will come back alive and safe. And as for ReiserFS: I will continue using it just as I did before, even if Hans gets convicted. It’s not like the filesystem has done anything wrong or that Hans has done it all. It’s a great filesystem.
For all we know she split back to Russia. The police have no body and the only motive i’ve heard of is the divorce.
I hope that 4 lives weren’t destroyed by anger or petiness.
-nX
I was raised to believe in the concept of innocent before proven guilty. I also believe you must have habeous corpus. But we’ve moved into a post-Red-Scare to Islam-Scare society … so it is just a matter of time before they start picking up Linux users for having Kill Bill screen shots.
i live in italy. And I don’t understand how you can accuse an individual of committing murder if there isn’t even a corpse… How do yu know she’s dead if there isn’t a corpse yet? It’s quite ridicolous.