Alexander Viro wrote:
>I
> have no problems with people who actually wrote it. The fact that they got
> a slimeball as a business manager has nothing with the technical side of
> story. I find the fact that you claim credit for others' work and
> especially the way you do it disgusting at extreme, but it doesn't make
> said work worse.
Viro, throughout the whole initial development of ReiserFS I spent 15-20 hours a
week arguing over every algorithm we used (and then I worked 40 hours a week
earning the salary that paid everyone in russia working for me). I didn't
always get every algorithm done my way, and half the time my way was the wrong
way, and surely I learned, and surely I was completely unqualified (we all
were), but if you think I played no technical role in the design of reiserfs you
couldn't be more wrong.
The idea to do the filesystem was mine. The idea to aggregate small files was
mine. The idea to use B+trees rather than B-trees was mine, and was shoved down
someone's protesting throat by me. Going on farther would be silly. We ALL
threw every idea we had into the debate, so the list of ideas that weren't mine
is also long.
The guys who left left in part because Vladimir outcoded them all, and I told
the head of the research center that if he didn't work as hard as Vladimir he
wasn't going to get paid as much. You should understand that Vladimir was the
most junior member of the research team, and this was a PhD who thought a PhD
was something really impressive. That wasn't the major reason though. The
larger part of it was that he wanted me to accept his algorithms and I told him
that he would use mine or not get paid. It really bothered him to work under
the direction of an American with no PhD who wanted to do all these things that
weren't in any textbook and were surely wrong therefor. Hee Hee. It still
makes me smile.
If it concerns you that I don't credit them by name, I guess you weren't
listening on the phone when their swedish VC backer who wanted me to sell
ReiserFS to them and who was in the protective services business here in Russia,
suggested they might hire a hundred researchers to swear in Russian Court that I
had no role in creating the filesystem. That was the day the name changed from
treefs. You certainly weren't there when they tried to make it very difficult
for me to continue ReiserFS without selling it to them by forbidding Vladimir to
help me on weekends with commenting their execrable code to the point that I
could find the bugs. (He told them he'd leave the job they gave him in America
and go back to Russia. They gave in, but eventually he went back to Russia
anyway, to work on our project.) I really don't think that persons who leave a
project and then do all in their power to choke it out of existence deserve any
credit at all. In V4 all of their remaining code will be tossed, we have been
getting rid of it in pieces, but it is time to rip the heart out of it.
By the way, the swedish protective services guy then proceeded to lose all of
the money of the Russian investors backing him (they were vodka factory and
casino money). I think the major part of the money ($1 million if I remember
right) went to some guys in the secret police who claimed to have an algorithm
proving that P=NP, but would not disclose the algorithm because it was so
valuable it needed to be kept secret. Said PhD working for me, who had some
specialization in this area, did a formal evaluation, and encouraged the
investment by the investor. I still wonder if some money went to him to help
shape his opinion, but I'll never really know this.
In sum, ReiserFS would have been completed faster if I had never met them.
Debugging and tweaking their code rather than scrapping it and recoding by
myself was a serious mistake of mine. It was one bug away from working for a
very long time, and the performance was deeply depressing for a long time.
Fortunately the thing that really affected performance was block allocation
policy, and that was Vladimir's code so it was extremely easy to work with.
The only good thing that came out of that experience was meeting Vladimir.
That's a pretty damn good thing though, and maybe that alone was worth all of
it.
Hans
PS
I don't think any of the people I see you flame are guilty of doing anything
more than trying to contribute to Linux. You could surely tell them what their
bugs are without discouraging them from making more contributions in that manner
that you do. Think about that.
I hope this thread dies soon though.
