The last few months there has been one story that repeatedly made it to the front page of virtually every FOSS news site in the world. Hans Reiser, the man who brought us the first ever journalising file-system for GNU/Linux and whose file-system remains one of the most innovative ever created, is accused of murdering his wife.
As the trial unfolds, news sites have been following it very closely – so apparently has a lot of geeks all around the world then.
Now I would like to see justice done in the trial. If Reiser is innocent, I hope he is found so, if he is guilty – I hope he gets punished to the full extent of the law – but this is no different than the feelings I feel about every other criminal trial happening everywhere in the world at this or any other moment. So why exactly are we as geeks so obsessed with the Reiser trial ? Because nobody involved with GNU/Linux at such a high level has ever been charged with a violent crime before ? Well considering the sheer number of people involved in GNU/Linux (even at the kernel level) statistically it was just a matter of time anyway. So it happened to be Reiser. So what ?
What this trial really did was to bring into sharp relief the enormous degree of celebrity appeal that successful geeks have for other geeks. Our fascination here is no different from when the world craned to see if O.J. and Winona would be found guilty. Basically while geeks frequently mock the kind of people who follow celebrity lives so closely, and cannot understand why anybody would actually care what Tom Cruise and Katie did last week… it seems that we are no different, our celebs just have different talents.
Well there has been the odd inexplicable death/murder in Hollywood (I highly recommend the movie Hollywoodland by the way), which everyone in the world somehow felt personally involved in (well except the geeks). Now we have one with a programing guru involved – so suddenly all the programmers are feeling personally involved.
Well frankly, it’s silly. Who killed George Reeves is no more important than who killed any of the thousands of people who were killed since you started reading this article. We close our eyes to them because we don’t know their names. We suddenly have to deal with our emotions about murder when we do know their names. So now we know the name of (and many of us have had personal communications over the year with) the defendant.
But he is not our friend for the vast majority – just somebody we worked on something with, in most cases not even professionally. I don’t think this trial will have any effect whatsoever on the popularity of GNU/Linux – no more than the O.J. trial made movies unpopular. It really doesn’t have anything to do with us. We aren’t liveblogging the trial of the crack-crazed killer who shot his grandmother to pay for his fix yesterday (there’s guaranteed to be a few).
Frankly, I don’t think the Reiser trial matters in the grand scheme of things. It’s a pity that somebody involved in GNU/Linux is charged with murder, but it’s nothing more than that, a pity. Whatever the outcome of the trial, it really won’t affect our lives or our work in any way whatsoever. We still have plenty of celebs left, RMS and Torvalds provide plenty of entertainment almost daily. We really ought to stop blowing Hans Reiser’s importance out of proportion like that.