Mourning Wolfgang Denk

Meus mais sinceros sentimentos :-(.

One of things that suck the most about getting old is seeing your heroes go.

Fare well, Mr. Denk. Your contributions to making embedded systems suck less are enormous!

Riposa in pace. Porting U-Boot has been my first interesting job in my life.

I'm at a loss of words on hearing this. Over the past 20+ years it had been a privilege and pleasure to work and network with Wolfgang. If I recall correctly we first interacted during some of the discussions about real-time and Linux in the late '90s and early 2000s. Later, when I was looking for reviewers for the Building Embedded Linux Systems book I was writing for O'Reilly, Wolfgang volunteered and later explained to me that he enlisted help from others at Denx, such as Detlev Zundel. I viewed his feedback and that of other reviewers as crucial in making sure the book was on-topic and accurate.

I lost track of Wolfgang for a few years as I went into other projects but then started seeing him again on a yearly basis at Embedded World in the early 2010s. Such a pleasure to run into him and hear his point of view on all things embedded Linux related.

On one such occasions he explained to me the story behind PPC-Boot (which eventually became U-Boot). Apparently Siemens was looking for a PPC bootloader in the late '90s and Wolfgang proposed taking the open source 8xxROM as a starting point. Siemens apparently wasn't having any of that. This "open source" thing wasn't to their liking. So Wolfgang drafted a quote comparing what it would cost if he started from scratch vs. starting with 8xxROM. Upon seeing the difference Siemens apparently agreed to fund PPCboot. "And that's how U-Boot was born" is how I recall Wolfgang concluded the story.

Given how prevalent U-boot now is, the entire world owes a debt of gratitude to Wolfgang for having been able to bootstrap this project and leading it for many years while holding the bar very high.

Thank you my friend. You will be sorely missed.

Rest in peace, Wolfgang! It can be a hard life, advocating for FOSS. I was never much of a coder, but when I was working, I knew FOSS was the way to go, and I got a lot of flak for advocating. There was even a time when supervisors would absolutely not accept the use of open-source tools for anything. So, in that sense alone, you were a hero.

May your transition to a new life be without too many bumps in the road!

Thank you for your service, freedom fighter.

Your contributions significantly bettered our civilization as a whole and will not be forgotten.

Many embedded systems booted with U-Boot are orbiting Earth right now. Rest in peace, Wolfgang.

I wrote some patches for the u-boot-secure port—well, the user-space tools, when I had the first Samsung ARM Chromebook.

I met Wolfgang at Embedded World 2016 on the DENX booth. He was a very brillant guy.

Thanks for U-Boot and your implication in Embedded Linux...

I still remember the first time when I collaborated with Wolfgang. He was such a kind and open minded person with a such a great value system.

Together with the amazing Denx crew we upstreamed all our custom CPU modules to the U-Boot source code. We also collaborated on the 2038 support within glibc, Linux Kernel and of course U-Boot.

I still remember when I did a demo of GitLab and Travis CI to Wolfgang and of course we also exchanged on personal topics such as nice restaurants in Usedom.

Once I explained Wolfgang about the pain of license compliance and shared the idea to use SPDX-License-Identifier. He agreed on solving this at the source code level like engineers would do and he made https://source.denx.de/u-boot/u-boot/-/commit/eca3aeb352c... in 2013. Nowadays, this ended up within Linux Kernel and many other widely used open source projects.

He was a real pioneer and I'm so sad he passed away. I will always remember and wish all the best to family and friends!

Thank you so much Wolfgang for the opportunity at DENX and all the experience you gave me! How fast time passes. What a huge lost. My condolences to your family. This is just so sad.