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Hans Reiser: Once a Linux Visionary, Now Accused of Murder

Joshua Davis Email 06.26.07

On the overcast Sunday of Labor Day weekend 2006, Nina Reiser goes shopping at a crowded Berkeley, California, grocery store. Although she has been living in the US for nearly eight years, she was born and raised in Russia at a time when stores like this didn't exist. The place is stocked with heirloom tomatoes and vegan burgers, and Nina loads up her cart. She brings along her son, Rory, 6, and daughter, Niorline, 5. After depositing the groceries in her minivan, she drives to the quiet neighborhood where her husband now lives with his mother. Reiser will have the kids for the rest of the weekend. Rory tells two versions of what happened next:

+ znode *left_child;
+ znode *right_child;

Version 00

Version 01
On the witness stand during the December hearing to determine whether his father should be tried for murder, Rory tells the court that he came back upstairs and stayed in the entryway with his mother and father. They were not arguing. His mother gave him a hug good-bye. Then she walked out the door and got in the van. He watched her drive away. This was the last time he ever saw his mother.

+ warning("nikita-3177", "Parent not found");

Reiser is crying. He is pale, unshaven, and his stubble is flecked with white. His nose is running. It's hard for him to wipe it with his hands shackled. This is my second visit to the jail, and he has deteriorated in the past six weeks. He tells me that he's tormented by what's happened to his two children. After Nina disappeared, the Alameda County social services agency put Rory and Niorline in a foster home at the urging of police. Two weeks later, the county family court released them to Nina's mother, who took them to Russia for the holidays. It's now late January. They were supposed to return weeks ago. Instead, a letter arrived from a lawyer in Russia, explaining that the kids were terrified of the US and would not return.

Nina Reiser, an obstetrician and mother of two, has not been seen since September 2006. Police believe she was murdered, but her body has not been found.

Reiser is facing other losses as well. Novell, one of the largest Linux distributors to include his software, dropped his file system from its future offerings two days after his arrest. The process of preparing Reiser4, his next-generation code, for inclusion in the Linux kernel has all but stopped as his time and cash have been redirected toward his defense. He can't make payroll for Namesys, his file system company.

"Programs are in some sense our children," Reiser tells me. He explains that programs can be discriminated against just like people. That's why he wanted to raise his file system in the open source community, where people and programs are encouraged to interact free of corporate barriers to communication. The point wasn't to make a lot of money. It was to make the world a better place.

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