FOSS community mourns the loss of Thiemo Seufer

[Posted December 30, 2008 by jake]

With heartfelt grief we announce the sudden death of Thiemo Seufer (ths) in a tragic car accident on December 26th.

Thiemo was a long-term contributor to Free and Open Source Software. He was involved in the Debian, binutils, MIPS-Linux, and QEMU projects among others.

Within Debian, Thiemo was valued both as a developer and as a friend. He took responsibility for much of the work needed to support the MIPS port, showing long-term commitment to that cause. He was always happy to help with development, whether working on new projects or fixing bugs. His great skill and good humor were an inspiration to us all.

Thiemo was a contributor for the Linux/MIPS project for over 8 years which eventually led him to join MIPS UK. His outstanding and unselfish work on the kernel and other system components made him one of the key contributors. His modest character and humor will be missed by his Linux/MIPS co-developers and former coworkers of MIPS UK.

Thiemo served as a binutils maintainer for more than five years. It was a pleasure to work with him; he was always helpful, always polite, and his technical arguments pretty much always right.

Thiemo continuously dedicated some of his time to contribute to the QEMU project especially the MIPS emulation. His code contributions were very appreciated as well as his opinion in technical discussions, always expressed without any resentment.

Thiemo joined linutronix in April 2008 and instantly earned the respect of their engineering team and customers due to his broad and deep technical knowledge combined with his calm and considerate demeanor.

His wide knowledge and interests beyond the scope of computers and software were always a source of enjoyable conversations, often taking surprising turns caused by his subtle sense of humor.

Thiemo will be missed as a fellow developer, colleague and friend. Our deepest sympathy is with Thiemo's family.

Bdale Garbee, Steve McIntyre, Ralf Baechle, Daniel Jacobowitz, Aurelien Jarno, Thomas Gleixner

The funeral service will be on Monday January 5th 2009 13:30 at Dominikanerkirche Bad Wimpfen, Germany (map).

If you want to express your condolences please send mail to ths-condolence@linutronix.de . It will be passed on to Thiemo's family.

FOSS community mourns the loss of Thiemo Seufer

Posted Dec 30, 2008 16:54 UTC (Tue) by tbm (subscriber, #7049) [Link]

I worked with Thiemo on Debian's MIPS port the last few years and I'm deeply saddened by his death. I can only echo what has been written about him. Thiemo had a very deep technical knowledge and in addition to this he was very reliable and fun to work with. I'll miss him.

FOSS community mourns the loss of Thiemo Seufer

Posted Dec 30, 2008 20:42 UTC (Tue) by liamh (guest, #4872) [Link]

I knew of him from his activity and helpfulness in the Lisp community. I had no idea had did all those other things as well. This is very sad news.

Liam

FOSS community mourns the loss of Thiemo Seufer

Posted Dec 31, 2008 1:54 UTC (Wed) by wangbj (guest, #46132) [Link]

The first time I know about him is from arch/mips/mm/tlbex.c, using a uasm routine to write the mips tlb handlers (asm) using c code, and I'm quite impressed by the comments of that source file. I think he is a very important person in linux/mips port. This is really a terriable news, especially in this day..

FOSS community mourns the loss of Thiemo Seufer

Posted Dec 31, 2008 6:15 UTC (Wed) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]

Car accidents. Gary Seven, in the Star Trek episode "Assignment: Earth" had a strong opinion on that: "What a waste".

People who don't contribute to our future also are lost to car accidents. It happens. But this guy was apparently so multi-talented, and applied his talents to the public good.

I cannot honestly say that I will miss him. I did not even know who he was until now. But I do sense a loss. There are so many people whom we depend upon, in our open source communty, whom we do not even know.

FOSS community mourns the loss of Thiemo Seufer

Posted Dec 31, 2008 9:37 UTC (Wed) by danieldk (subscriber, #27876) [Link]

I have never met nor spoken to Thiemo, though reading this article I can see many of us have used and enjoyed his work. My thoughts go out to his family and friends.

FOSS community mourns the loss of Thiemo Seufer

Posted Nov 9, 2010 13:22 UTC (Tue) by happyaron (subscriber, #62220) [Link]

In memory of him.