I put a quote from the Reisersf homepage below. I have two comments. 1) I love his metaphor comparing closed economies like corporations to a large communal group and open economies to the Linux development model. This is an especially poignant comment since it comes from people who have experienced the stiffling brutality of communism. 2) With the Terra byte disk not far away, why limit the system to 4.29 billion objects? Were there that many empty files it would still take 156GB+ just to store the names, and with an average of 1KB per file about 4.4TB. I believe that we will be seeing 50 - 250GB disk systems this year and possible 100-1000+ TB systems within five years unsing quantum technology. Consider that there are 6.8 billion people on the planet right now. That's almost twice as many objects as the current Reisersf allows. JLK Hans Reiser stated: "I believe it is not so much the cost that has made Linux so successful as it is the openness. Linux is a decentralized economy with honor and recognition as the currency of payment (and thus there is much honor in it). Commercial OS vendors are, at the moment, all closed economies, and doomed to fall in their competition with open economies just as communism eventually fell. At some point an OS vendor will realize that if it: - opens up its source code to decentralized modification, - systematically rewards those who perform the modifications that are proven useful, - systematically merges/integrates those modifications into its branded primary release branch while adding value as the integrator, - that it will acquire both the critical mass of the internet development community, and the aggressive edge that no large communal group (such as a corporation) can have. Rather than saying to any such vendor that they should do this now, let me simply point out that whoever is first will have an enormous advantage..... Since I have more recognition than money to pass around as reward, my policy is to tend to require that those who contribute substantial software to this project have their names attached to a user visible portion of the project. This official policy helps me deal with folks like Vladimir, who was much too modest to ever name the file system checker vsck without my insisting. Smaller contributions are to be noted in the source code, and the acknowledgements section of this paper. If you choose to contribute to this file system, and your work is accepted into the primary release, you should let me know if you want me to look for opportunities to integrate you into contracts from commercial vendors. Through packaging ourselves as a group, we are more marketable to such OS vendors. Many of us have spent too much time working at day jobs unrelated to our Linux work. This is too hard, and I hope to make things easier for us all. If you like this business model of selling GPL'd component software with related support services, but you write software not related to this file system, I encourage you to form a component supplier company also. Opportunities may arise for us to cooperate in our marketing, and I will be happy to do so." -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/