Jörg Schilling is gone

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.