LWN: Comments on "Mourning Steve Langasek"

Debian's obituary

cjwatson — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 12:07:18 +0000

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

A bit of background

burki99 — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 08:49:21 +0000

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...

Move the world

geofft — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 06:19:26 +0000

> 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.

Very sad

wt — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 21:10:38 +0000

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