Very creepy. I have to admit that I stopped using ReiserFS and switched to other filesystems (ext3, jfs) when I found out about his case. And the ReiserFS project has its own life, so it's not really fair to the developers; but Reiser is just too diabolical for me to stick with the filesystem that bears his name.

I'm trying to not be judgemental, but I am.

The point of the article is what? The writer had an interview with someone whom he didn't like and didn't really like him, but wanted to write an article for salon so that....

How did this article make it in?

His sentence is reduced from 25-life to 15-life, but can't he be tried for perjury and tack on 10-25 more? Every time he denied killing his wife he was lying.

Is this article about the murderer? Or the author?

The proper article is about anything else but the person writing it.

Far too many Slashdotters are more worried about whether or not he was treated fairly, how he could be convicted without a body, and if the jury simply didn't like him. Even now they simply don't get it.

"I'm not into BDSM," Hans said. I could have told him I had written a book about my ongoing experiences with BDSM, but he was already on the verge of hanging up, and he wasn't interested in knowing anything about me.

Your readers don't either.

By looking even worse than the drearily negative, fatuously self-righteous blowhard Elliott.

I could find no evidence suggesting that ReiserFS comprises

millions of lines of code. Reiser4 is about 100K, and the

Linux kernel in total is somewhere in the ballpark of 6 million.

It seems sloppy to suggest that Reiser supervised the development

of millions of lines of code. Is this to make him seem more

important in some way?

... that he was trying to implicate the ex-boyfriend who was into BSDM.

Since the victim had been strangled, that might almost make some sense, at least as a source of "resonable doubt" for the jury.

Except for one thing: how did Reiser know she was strangled?

Cheaters cheat, liars lie. You can't punish a hound for being a hound. It's not a sin, it's their nature. The thing I'm always drawn to are the victims of personalities like this. What induces them to ignore the signs and stick around. What exactly did the successful and apparently intelligent and educated Mrs. Reiser get out of sticking with Hans.

I've followed the trial with moderate interest, but as far as I can tell, ReiserFS is out of Hans's hands. It's in the kernel source, and basically lives independently of any ideas he might have. That surely has been the case since he killed his wife, other things like trying to convince the world he's innocent occupying his time.

IMO, ReiserFS lives separately from the person Hans Reiser. Good riddance to him, but thanks for the software. It continues to be used on my production systems.

Open source is a community. What do we do in a community when someone performs a heinous act? We shun them. We cast them out.

Personally I don't want to be associated with anything that could benefit the man, directly or indirectly, after what he's done. Two disk partitions on the computer I'm typing on right now are ReiserFS, and at my earliest convenience they won't be. Simple as that.

Elliot's experience of coming face-to-face with a murderer reminds me of my own. In my case, it was personal; the victim had been a close personal friend, almost a family member. I sat with her family through what seemed like an endless string of trials and hearings, studying the faces of the killers, listening to their voices, reading their files, trying to understand. After the last of the three killers was sentenced, we were told that he wanted to speak to family members.

I think the victim's husband and children were hoping for some insight into why he would do something so pointless. I think they were hoping for an apology. Instead he spent the time trying to torment them by recounting how the victim pleaded for her life in her last moments. There's a word for what he was, for what Reiser appears to be: sociopath. But giving it a name doesn't explain anything.

It's hard to describe the frustration of facing these blithe soulless creatures. You want to peel their skin off and see if there's anything under it. You want to shock them and see if they can feel pain. It's probably good that we don't let friends and family members sentence killers, because my dreams and fantasies at that time weren't ones I'm proud of now. In the end, you're forced to face the truth: there is no sense to be made, no reason at work. For some reason the sky doesn't open and nothing strikes these monsters dead. They go on walking and talking and eating, just like other people.

Seems likely to be true; he probably wrote many more things than the ones he's famous for. The programmers I know pretty much do it all the time, like breathing.

One hundred per cent classic Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

I know someone very much like this. He hasn't killed anyone (yet.) Let's hope that doesn't change....

I would call this article laughable if I hadn't cringed my way to the ending. I sincerely hoped that Elliott would write himself out of his own amateur journalism. Unfortunately, all he accomplished was painting himself in almost as bad a light as he attempted to portray Reiser. We all can make simple character assessments of murderers ourselves - and Elliot obviously does not give his audience this credit. In OUR defense, looking over these reviews, it seems he was as misguided as poor Reiser there...

Also, why do I get the feeling that this "interview" seemed a whole lot more like self-satisfaction and gloating in front of a convicted man as opposed to the revelation quest to which Elliot refers? Seems to me he had his smug little mind made up before he even showed up.