Hans Reiser, creator of the ReiserFS, is found guilty of murdering his ex-wife, Nina. Described as odd, strange, and narcissistic by the prosecuting attorneys and having Asperger's Syndrome by his attorney; the jury decided against him. Unfortunately, the evidence against him was significant and damning. The prosecutors gave Reiser's ongoing custody battle as motive for the killing.

Reiser was somewhat of a child prodigy having entered into The University of California at Berkeley at 14. He created his own personalized degree plan and earned his BA degree in Systematizing.

The ReiserFS and Reiser4 filesystems, that bear his name, break from traditional block allocation filesystems and are generally faster and more efficient than traditional filesystems such as ext2 and ext3. The ReiserFS and Reiser4 filesystems are considered to be noteworthy technological contributions to Linux.

Some see this as a blemish on the face of the Linux community but many disagree. He is an individual who made a serious error in judgement but he, in no way, represents the entire Linux community--or even the totality of the ReiserFS project.

The ReiserFS and Reiser4 projects will continue and have been given space at kernel.org to continue.

Guilty or not, I don't believe his fate will in any way deter users, corporate or personal, from leveraging and embracing Linux as their Operating System of choice.