Namesys vanishes, but Reiser project lives on
Namesys, the company run by murder suspect Hans Reiser, has fallen off the face of the Internet, but the file-system software it was commercializing is still under development by volunteers.
Hans Reiser
(Credit: via Stanford University)
"Commercial activity of Namesys has stopped," said programmer and Namesys employee Edward Shishkin. But he and others continue to develop the Reiser4 file-system software.
"It is pretty active. Many people are interested in this project," Shishkin said. "They help a lot," he added, pointing to fixes needed to work with Linux's virtual file system software and other changes.
Reiser himself is accused of murdering his wife; his trial began in November. Although the trial derailed Namesys, the Reiser file system software already was slipping from prominence. Top Linux Seller Red Hat prefers an alternative, ext3, and Reiser's biggest corporate advocate, Novell's Suse Linux operation, switched to ext3 by default in 2006, citing customer preference.
Murder trials are hardly a common reason for a company or project to be derailed, but the Reiser situation does shed light on one interesting attribute of open-source software: interested parties can keep a project alive without having to wait for some bankruptcy court to sell off intellectual property or other assets.
The Namesys Web site is no longer available because of a technical problem, and the programmer who can fix it said he's dealing with family issues hundreds of miles away. However, the Reiser4 source code is still available on Shishkin's Web site.
Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen, or follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/stshank.
This is part and parcel of why Open Source makes more sense for businesses. If I run a company and my solutions suddenly become unsupportable? I can still support it myself by simple dint of either contracting someone to keep it up to date, or by doing it in-house if I have programmers on staff.
(I use ext2/3 anyway for most of my servers, but it's good to know that the Reiser-rigged SuSE servers I do have can continue onwards regardless of what happens).
/P