In my post the other day about whether or not work in the ReiserFS file system would continue after Hans Reiser's murder conviction, I mentioned that this being an open source project, it wouldn't be hard for someone else to pick up where others leave off.  And as it turns out, that's precisely what's happening: according to folks on the ReiserFS team, work on ReiserFS will continue.

Earlier today I was contacted by Alexander Lymin and Edward Shishkin, two of the developers on the ReiserFS team.  Alex wanted to make it clear that "there is no need for drama" -- that work on ReiserFS hasn't stopped, even if they don't have the kind of resources they would like right now.

Alex echoed my point about picking up where others left off in his own words: "Perhaps the single strongest property of open source software is 'distributed reliability'; i.e., if one company/person fails, there are 10 others to pick up the banner."  I'll add that while such a thing is not guaranteed, it's made that much easier, which is itself sometimes half the battle.

From what I've seen, ReiserFS (specifically, the newest iteration named Reiser4) is too good a project to abandon.  Many people use the earlier ReiserFS in a daily context and swear by it, and many improvements to the system are planned for version 4.  It's good to hear that work will continue, even if not at the pace it was happening before -- and perhaps in time one of the more aggressive Linux development outfits (IBM, Red Hat) can help out, too.