It's made even worse by the fucked up state of the US prison system -- his contribution really doesn't need to wasted. Would it be so horrible to give him a laptop and some internet access and let him hack?
Wow, what an enormous rathole you have discovered.
Let me politely decline to explore this complex issue of justice, policing, and ethics -- one which probably should be decided case-by-case rather than by a one-size-fits-all rule -- and just point out that accepting patches from an apparently-insane convicted murderer is really, really bad P.R. for your open source project.
Yes, but it's harder to use an entry in the OED to send real-time messages to your opium supplier on the outside, coordinate your escape attempt, rob a bank, or open security holes that will allow Russian mobsters to 0wn the paper dictionary and use it to send out ads for authentic-whalebone penis extensions.
(That would be a funny steampunk novel.)
But, yes, this is the guy I had in mind when I said that you have to consider the question on a case-by-case basis.
But Phil Spector hasn't done important work in over three decades. Different story altogether...the world will not suffer without his creative output, while I suspect it will in the case of Reiser. Though, we might find that without his cantankerous and obstinate style of addressing the LKML ReiserFS may wind up more widely used. That assumes that the SuSE folks keep working on it, and the Namesys guys are able to keep the company going under new leadership (this is a problem, as Hans' stubbornness and passion for the idea is the primary reason Namesys has lasted as long as it has, and I doubt anyone else will have that crazy drive to keep it going--the best thing that could happen is probably a buyout by SuSE or IBM or similar).
I think you need to take a serious step back and actually view his work for what it is. You're acting like the guy deserves a Noble prize for his contributions to society.
I never mentioned any prizes. In fact, only one sentence of the above was a positive comment about Hans, and most of the the rest pointing out his flaws as a project leader.
But, prisoners generally are encouraged to work as part of their rehabilitation, and it seems to me that if his skills are most useful to the public in the development of software.
Nobody said he's Albert Einstein or Jimmy Carter. Just that he's done useful work for society--millions of people use ReiserFS, and he's worked for the US government for many years doing cryptographic and plugin-capable filesystem work--and that he could continue to do useful work for society with a few minor modifications to the terms of his imprisonment.
If you think Open Source software on the scale that Hans was involved in it has no value to society, then we'll have to agree to disagree.
If I had gone down this rathole, instead of merely peering over the edge of the conversational abyss... my proposal would have been along the lines of this EFF proposal that you reference.
Giving prisoners real-time access to broadband communication is fraught with complications. Giving them a computer with no network is not especially different from giving them books and letting them read and write paper mail -- which I support, of course.
