Several years ago there was a dispute over the direction that the development of the XFree86 project should take. The plan was to make substantial changes to the licensing and distribution of the software. However, the bulk of the developers found that the proposed changes were neither appropriate nor useful. Thgus they forked the project and X.org was born. Since then the team has continued to make regular releases of the project and nowadays almost all the major Linux distributions use X.org as their default X11 implementation. The reason this is possible is open source.
There is no reason to believe that Mr. Reiser's conviction (which was WAY back in April) spells the demise of ReiserFS. Indeed, even the cessation of development activities by Namesys is not the end of the road. The beauty of the open source development model is that anybody with an interest in file systems can download the code (still available at kernel.org) and continue his work. In the meantime the code for ReiserFS, Reiser4 and reiserfsprogs continues to be available and is no less stable than it was before Hans agreed to reveal the location of his late wife's remains. I would therefor encourage people to choose file systems based on their relative merits, rather than concerns over continued development. It may be that bug reports go unheeded for a while. But remember, although there may be nobody around to sue if things go wrong, at least you aren't depending on the continued profitability of some company to keep your filesystem available! That's the best reason in the world to go open source! Sincerely, Erik Johnson Northern Illinois University On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 8:29 PM, Marcy Cortes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hans Reiser leads police to body: > > http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/07/BAN011LDR8.D > TL > > Those still running reiserfs on their linux server may want to format > and try ext3... > > > > Marcy Cortes > "This message may contain confidential and/or privileged information. If > you are not the addressee or authorized to receive this for the > addressee, you must not use, copy, disclose, or take any action based on > this message or any information herein. If you have received this > message in error, please advise the sender immediately by reply e-mail > and delete this message. Thank you for your cooperation." > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit > http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
