ReiserFS for sale
Mr Reiser is accused to have murdered his wife. To pay his lawyer, he wants to sell his company NameSys. I don´t really think, that this will bring a larger amount of money in his pockets. Out of multiple reasons:
- At first there are multiple filesystems on the market. Although a fast filesystem, ReiserFS has not the reputation of being a secure filesystem for extreme loads. From my observation the star of ReiserFS was already sinking.
- I don´t see any value in the company Namesys that is bounded to the company itself. ReiserFS is GPL. You can simply take it and create your own business model on it, as long you respect the GPL. Hire some of the NameSys developers and you can start.
This is a disadvantage of a GPL-based open source business model. Someone else can simply take the stuff and make his or her own business out of it. Customer relations are very volatile. Especially when you haven´t a real unique selling point. Good for the linux community, as code maybe lives longer than companies contributing it. But a maybe a major headache for companies.