Mourning Steve Langasek

[Posted January 6, 2025 by corbet]

From the Ubuntu Discourse instance comes the sad news that longtime Debian and Ubuntu contributor Steve Langasek has passed away.

Steve passed away at the dawn of 2025. His time was short but remarkable. He will forever remain an inspiration. Judging by the outpouring of feelings this week, he is equally missed and mourned by colleagues and friends across the open source landscape, in particular in Ubuntu and Debian where he was a great mind, mentor and conscience.

Very sad

Posted Jan 6, 2025 21:10 UTC (Mon) by wt (subscriber, #11793) [Link]

This is very sad. He wasn't even that old. :(

Move the world

Posted Jan 7, 2025 6:19 UTC (Tue) by geofft (subscriber, #59789) [Link]

> In recent years he battled illness with stoicism, humour and science. Through it all he remained active and engaged in our community and our exploration of the future.

He remained so active that this news surprised me—I feel like I saw him posting very recently, and indeed, the last email I saw from him was to ubuntu-devel on November 29, in weeds of an OpenMPI ABI transition.

Which reminded me of his constant email signature: "Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS to set it on, and I can move the world." I think it's pretty clear he did move the world. This is a great loss for Debian and Ubuntu (and really the whole free software community), but also, those projects are immeasurably better for all the work he did do on them and we have much to be grateful for.

A bit of background

Posted Jan 7, 2025 8:49 UTC (Tue) by burki99 (subscriber, #17149) [Link]

Though it is ancient (2011, talking about introducing upstart), I found the following interview full of insights for someone like me who didn’t know him: https://raphaelhertzog.com/2011/05/06/people-behind-debia...

Debian's obituary

Posted Jan 19, 2025 12:07 UTC (Sun) by cjwatson (subscriber, #7322) [Link]

Debian's obituary is here: https://www.debian.org/News/2025/20250117