Comment by mpol
2 years ago
A few things that stuck out to me.
SuSE supposedly failed. I don't know who told him that. He might have expected it to be a RedHat or Ubuntu by now, which it isn't. But failed is very black and white. I would argue, if they still exist as they do now, they are quite successful.
He talks about Reiser V4. I think there is a Reiser V5 now? Or am I wrong? I cannot find that on Wikipedia. Anyway, the chances of it ending up in the Linux kernel seem close to zero.
He sounds very humble. Also he talks about being more social and having got education and therapy in prison. Still it reads as if they are all working together in prison, in certain ways. The world out there might be more complex. I don't know if he is being naive in this regard.
He does mention Reiser5 in his letter:
> I don’t know what is in Reiser 5—I haven’t been told, and I cannot go on the Internet. Edward Shishkin is a very bright man though, and one of my regrets is that I didn’t spend more time with him, I am confident he has done some thing nice in Reiser 5.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Reiser5-Development is the last reference I find to Rieser5, but the link in it goes to what appears to just be Reiser4 maintained against moderately recent kernels.
He is also still talking about spinning rust (rotational delay). I forget the timeline, but maybe he went into prison before SSDs became ubiquitous? (I know they are still in servers)
Yes, he went to prison around the time when I started using Linux and when HDDs were very much still the default choice. SSDs often held 64 or 128 GB for a high cost and with questionable lifespans.
> He sounds very humble.
psychopaths work very hard at this.