On 2017-02-11 at 22:51:57 +0000, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
do you know the history of hans reiser? is his software available today? given his history, if his software *was* available today, do you think anyone would want to install it and use it? why not? it's free software, right? you can change it, keep it, it's entirely under a libre license... so what's the problem?
Actually, yes, his software *is* available today: according to wikipedia (and to a quick ``ls /lib/modules/4.9.0-1-amd64/kernel/fs/reiserfs/``) ReiserFS is still available in the linux kernel, altought probably used more to access legacy systems than for new deployments. Of course, by this time it's no longer "his software", but more software that belongs to the community, based on code written by Hans Reiser but then modified by multiple people in the meanwhile.
I strongly suspect that the fact that it is an early 2000s filesystem with no modern features is more relevant to the fact that very few people are using it today than the private life of its main (but not only) developer. IIRC its decline had already started before the murder / arrest, because developement on it had already stopped, and new features where being added to Reiser4 (which was never ready for acceptance in mainline, however).