Jörg Schilling is gone

Jörg Schilling, a longtime free-software developer, has passed on. Most people will remember him from his work on cdrtools and the seemingly endless drama that surrounded that work. He was a difficult character to deal with, but he also contributed some important code that, for a period, almost all of us depended on. Rest well, Jörg.

From:		Robert Clausecker <fuz-AT-fuz.su>
To:		tuhs-AT-tuhs.org
Subject:		[TUHS] RIP Jörg Schilling
Date:		Mon, 11 Oct 2021 13:44:47 +0200
Message-ID:		<YWQjr9QoVGKmE5+Y@fuz.su>
Archive-link:		Article

I have received message from his family that Jörg Schilling has
passed away from complications related to kidney cancer this sunday
around noon (CEST).

He will be remembered for his open source projects including

 - cdrtools, the first portable CD burning program
 - star, a powerful and fast tar implementation, the first to
   use two processes with a shared ring buffer for better
   performance.
 - smake, a make implementation with autoconf features
 - sformat, a versatile SCSI disk formatting program
 - SING, an autoconf fork with a comprehensive set of libc
   shims, providing a uniform API across operating systems
 - ved, an early visual editor for the UNOS operating system (I believe)
 - bosh, a carefully maintained fork of the Bourne shell
 - sccs, a carefully maintained fork of SCCS.  His attempts
   to teach it projects and networking will remain unfinished.
 - libfind, an implementation of find(1) as a library for
   integration into other software.
 - libxtermcap, an extended termcap library
 - libscg, an early portable SCSI driver and library

He is also remembered for his commitment to open source, portability,
and his work on POSIX.  He was working on adapting his software to
Z/OS and introducing message catalogues just weeks before his death.

Jörg worked for the Bethold typesetting company, one of the first
European customers of SUN microsystems.  It is there that his love
for UNIX and SUN OS in particular was kindled. [1]

His interest in SUN OS culminated in Schillix, one of the first
open source Solaris distributions.

We will of course also remember him for his flames.

[1]:
https://web.archive.org/web/20061201103910/http://www.ope...

May his software immortalise him.

Robert Clausecker

-- 
()  ascii ribbon campaign - for an 8-bit clean world 
/\  - against html email  - against proprietary attachments

Jörg Schilling is gone

Posted Oct 11, 2021 16:06 UTC (Mon) by marduk (subscriber, #3831) [Link] (2 responses)

There are some things that I never saw eye-to-eye with Mr. Schilling, however I acknowledged that his "frame of reference" was a little different than mine. These days I find my own frame of reference askew with what is more generally accepted, so I can appreciate that now a lot more than I could years ago. I did/do appreciate his persistence and his contributions and can only imagine how different the Linux world would be without them. I hope that especially those from my generation don't forget that. May he rest in peace.

Jörg Schilling is gone

Posted Oct 11, 2021 16:40 UTC (Mon) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link]

cdrecord was the gateway drug to allow me to introduce FLOSS to a workplace. A Sun workstation had a hugely expensive CD burner attached. The software was also hugely expensive, didn't work and kept two professional sysadmins working for two days to puzzle it out. cdrecord "just worked"

That having been said: I watched the toll of the arguments over cdrtools vs. wodim, GPL and CDDL and the licensing mess which took its toll on a very valued colleague: great coder, valuable code but the concomitant fallout was very, very damaging. We are all complicated people: Joerg was more complex and less open to persuasion than almost anyone else.

Jörg Schilling is gone

Posted Oct 13, 2021 11:26 UTC (Wed) by rmrf (guest, #151769) [Link]

Very sorry to hear about his passing. I used his tools on Solaris.

Jörg Schilling is gone

Posted Oct 11, 2021 16:59 UTC (Mon) by blastwave (guest, #129935) [Link]

I have had the privilege of working with Jörg and also a lot of laughs. His sense of humour was truely "special". Even recently he was working on improvements to his SchilyTools code wherein it now builds and runs on z/OS systems as well as just about everything else one can imagine. I use the tools daily. We had some fun in the final days of the OpenSolaris project where we ended up joking a lot that our so called "Governance Board" was a joke all by itself. We had a lot of fun and did a lot of work to try to ensure that open and free software would not only be portable but also actually work. I really enjoyed how he kept a crew of people laughing about the wandering nature of his tomcat that often brought back little presents to him. It was only a little while ago we were chatting about why POSIX and open standards still matter more than ever and I think he was concerned we didn't have enough beer to talk about the topic. I don't know what I feel but I am very unhappy with this result. Right about now Jörg would say "let's just make the compiler switches a bit less crazy strict" usually with a joke where I would wonder if something was lost in the translation.

Dennis Clarke
RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC
UNIX and Linux spoken
GreyBeard and suspenders optional

Jörg Schilling is gone

Posted Oct 11, 2021 18:14 UTC (Mon) by wolfrider (guest, #3105) [Link]

Very sorry to hear about his passing - I emailed back/forth with him a couple of times, he was a good coder

Jörg Schilling is gone

Posted Oct 11, 2021 18:41 UTC (Mon) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]

Wow. I can't speak to the situation back in 2009 but over the years Jörg and I had many discussions on OpenGroup mailing lists regarding the POSIX standard for 'make'. He never once left it unsaid that since GNU make was not published until 1987 or so, he considered it the upstart kid, thumbing its nose at its elder, "more correct" implementations.

Nevertheless his passion to improve POSIX was always clear and uncompromising, and as much as they may engender frustration in the moment we need people like that to keep us honest and look out for the needs of the masses who rely on portability but don't have a voice.

His commitment and work ethic, not to mention institutional knowledge, will be definitely missed; RIP.

Jörg Schilling is gone

Posted Oct 11, 2021 20:46 UTC (Mon) by larkey (guest, #104463) [Link]

Having had the privilege of spending time as his intern, I can only echo what others have said: A remarkable character with unbreakable intention to do the right thing, to do better. Someone you could (and would, no choice!) argue for hours with. And even if you didn't come to an agreement, you learned something.

May you rest in peace.

Jörg Schilling is gone

Posted Oct 12, 2021 3:30 UTC (Tue) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

The first comment in the linked thread sums it up: tragic, more than anything.

cdrecord was a necessary piece of software for many people. When I first discovered the cdrkit fork I felt a huge sense of relief at finally being able to use my hardware without being told I'm an idiot using a broken OS. I told myself I'd do better if I ever had software with users.

Times have changed and I'm still stuck using unavoidable software that treats me like an idiot while it mutters under its breath about the OS being broken, but the new stuff has a big marketing budget and gives me a condescending smile and baby-babble error messages instead of insults; it just silently malfunctions and I lose weeks stumbling about blindly in frustration trying to hammer it back into operation.

I don't miss the edginess, but we've lost the honesty.

Jörg Schilling is gone

Posted Oct 27, 2021 5:28 UTC (Wed) by john.carter (guest, #123615) [Link]

In retrospect, much of the pain of the early days centered around painfulness of SCSI and CD formats.

I admire his skill and tenacity in creating something that did battle with various painful low level API's and formats on multiple platforms.... and worked.

Yes, some of his software could be a beast to drive.... but that merely reflected the insane complexity of the devices and formats they were driving.

If modern cd recording software is clean and easy... it's because some of the api's have become standardised and saner, and we're ignoring and not using a vast array of megaconfigurable options in the formats.

If he became a bit cranky about supporting all that... yup, I'd be too.

Rest now Jörg!

Jörg Schilling is gone

Posted Oct 12, 2021 7:19 UTC (Tue) by ajosey (guest, #1938) [Link]

Jörg will be greatly missed by myself and others in the POSIX and UNIX standards community. He was dedicated in his work on the standard and a great contributor. I was lucky enough a few years back to meet up with him one evening in Berlin where he showed me the city. We had a few beers and shared our UNIX stories, it was a fun evening. He was passionate on the technical details and also had a great sense of humour.
__
Andrew Josey
Austin Group Chair

Jörg Schilling is gone

Posted Oct 12, 2021 15:47 UTC (Tue) by dd9jn (✭ supporter ✭, #4459) [Link]

I am sorry to hear that.

Jörg was one of the just-a-few-years-older guys who introduced me to Unix conferences 30 years ago. In later years we had a few different opinons on technical details and free software history but he has always been a true and a fair hacker.

Rest in peace, Jörg.
Long live *nix.

Werner

Jörg Schilling is gone

Posted Oct 13, 2021 10:47 UTC (Wed) by walex (guest, #69836) [Link]

This is really sad news, and I admired Schilling for his many excellent contributions (in particular "S tar") and the depth of his insight into system and software design. He did have a "suffer no fools" uncompromising attitude that might have grated on many used more to american style "participation trophies" and to using salestalk for everything, but still one of my heroes.

Jörg Schilling is gone

Posted Oct 13, 2021 10:55 UTC (Wed) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (6 responses)

I always wondered why he didn't just switch back to the GPL, instead of insisting that he didn't need to, and that everyone else in the world was wrong. He never managed to convince anyone, and in effect completely sabotaged his own project. Just the tiniest bit of flex on his part, and distros would have happily included his software again.

From what he himself said (in the comments on the earlier linked LWN article), the switch to the CDDL was because someone was criticizing him in a way he didn't like. For all practical purposes, he destroyed his entire project because of spite about one person. He was happy to release under GPL before that, but suddenly it was CDDL only, and he would not come down off that hill, ever, no matter what.

I used cdrecord a lot back in the 2000s, and I'd have been happy to keep using it. But he actively made sure I couldn't, just so he didn't have to change his mind or his position in any way whatsoever.

I guess I mostly feel sad about it. He shut himself away from the entire community, when just the slightest bit of self-awareness on his part would have allowed his skill and participation to be meaningful.

I'm sorry he's gone. I wish I'd remembered that whole kerfuffle and tried to talk to him about it. I doubt it would have helped, but I wish I'd made the effort.

Jörg Schilling is gone

Posted Oct 14, 2021 10:22 UTC (Thu) by pgeorgi (guest, #74838) [Link] (3 responses)

> suddenly it was CDDL only

That might be because the CDDL only started to exist in 2005. Once something is available that you consider strictly superior, why go back?

> just the slightest bit of self-awareness on his part would have allowed his skill and participation to be meaningful

Meaningful to you, who wanted to use Jörg's software in a pre-packaged way. His software wasn't any less available to him, or to anybody who bothered to download a tarballs and compile themselves.

The GPL/CDDL thing is a distraction and merely served as catalyst: people had been unhappy with cdrecord's UI for a while at that point and moving from SCSI-style addressing to /dev/* style address was about the first thing wodim did. At that point the rift was unsurmountable, no matter the license.

Jörg Schilling is gone

Posted Oct 14, 2021 20:06 UTC (Thu) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (2 responses)

>Once something is available that you consider strictly superior, why go back?

Because the rest of the community you supposedly want to be a part of doesn't agree that it's better, and definitely agrees that it's incompatible with their chosen license? Because adopting that license means that you're forever shut out of every distro, which you then complain about for the rest of your life? He obviously wanted to be a part of the community, or he wouldn't have been complaining, but wasn't willing to take even the tiniest step to actually make that happen, instead resorting to vague legal threats.

>Meaningful to you, who wanted to use Jörg's software in a pre-packaged way. His software wasn't any less available to him, or to anybody who bothered to download a tarballs and compile themselves.

And I'm sure he and his tens of users were very happy. But obviously not happy enough, or he wouldn't have been bitching to all and sundry about his software not being included in distros anymore.

>At that point the rift was unsurmountable, no matter the license.

Only for an entirely ridiculous person that was unable to appreciate the validity of the viewpoints of other people. The SCSI syntax he insisted on wasn't even relevant anymore. It offered no actual benefit, and just made things hard.

SCSI CDROMs were already very rare, even when he was arguing about it, and they certainly don't exist in any meaningful way now. Yet, he still insisted on a labeling model based on SCSI chains. It was ridiculous on its face, and you're being ridiculous to support it now and even pretend that it was any actual barrier to inclusion.

Jörg Schilling is gone

Posted Oct 14, 2021 20:14 UTC (Thu) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link] (1 responses)

> He obviously wanted to be a part of the community, or he wouldn't have been complaining, but wasn't willing to take even the tiniest step to actually make that happen, instead resorting to vague legal threats.

I wonder how many people complain about Jorg while praising rms for the same mindset.

Jörg Schilling is gone

Posted Oct 14, 2021 21:05 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

> I wonder how many people complain about Jorg while praising rms for the same mindset.

RMS and FSF has a long history of resolving licensing issues like GPL violations in private and in good faith. I am not seeing the same mindset at play here.

Jörg Schilling is gone

Posted Oct 16, 2021 14:10 UTC (Sat) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (1 responses)

Bah... Jörg put his pride in his software and did not like others to distribute modified versions with issues that might reflect poorly on him.
He was far from being alone, the whole perl license (Artistic) was written for a similar purpose, albeit more diplomatically.
He was also not the only one to find Linux amateurish compared to Solaris circa 2005.

We has lost a skilled hacker.

Jörg Schilling is gone

Posted Oct 16, 2021 15:01 UTC (Sat) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link]

>Bah... Jörg put his pride in his software and did not like others to distribute modified versions with issues that might reflect poorly on him.

Downstream versions might suppress some of his verbosity about what he thought were bad choices, but I don't remember hearing about them changing the code itself. I believe he was pissed off about all those "warning" messages being removed, the ones telling the user that the Linux kernel was making bad choices. Criticizing people's systems is not what utility programs are supposed to be doing. Why should anyone have to sit through a screed telling them that Linux sucked every time they burned a CD? It's the same approximate behavior as RMS always interjecting himself into conversations whenever he saw people use the word "Linux" in a way he didn't like. Both behaviors were extremely impolite.

Instead, by switching to the CDDL, he "fixed" the problem by making sure nobody else distributed his code at all. If expressing his opinion was that important to him, well, he hit on a solution that stopped people suppressing those weird messages, but it was pretty clear that he was unhappy with the overall outcome.

>We has lost a skilled hacker.

I'm not sure he was really a part of 'we', in more than the general sense of being a human being who was skilled at computer programming. From what I can see, he shut himself out of the GPL community pretty much completely. So we in the sense of "all of humanity" are poorer for his loss, but we in the sense of "the GPL community" aren't really impacted, because AFAICT he wasn't a member anymore.

It was more important to him to say, over and over and over again, to hundreds of thousands of users, that Linux sucked.

Jörg Schilling is gone

Posted Oct 15, 2021 0:08 UTC (Fri) by watersb (guest, #10230) [Link] (1 responses)

Jörg Schillling's "s tar" archiver was an education for me. I have long since lost (and forgotten) the emails I exchanged with him regarding some bug or another; another idiosyncratic learning opportunity for me...

And here we are, arguing.

I cannot imagine a more fitting tribute to his legacy.

Jörg Schilling is gone

Posted Oct 19, 2021 19:05 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

>I cannot imagine a more fitting tribute to his legacy.

It is surely what he would have wanted.