Chapter 6. Remembering People We Have Lost

On March 1st, 2001, Christopher Matthew Rutter (also known as cmr) was killed after he was struck by a car at the age of 19. Christopher was a young and well known member of the Debian project helping the ARM port. The buildd.debian.org site is dedicated to his memory.

Chris Rutter will be missed.

On March 28th, 2001, Fabrizio Polacco passed away after a long illness. The Debian Project honors his good work and strong dedication to Debian and Free Software. The contributions of Fabrizio will not be forgotten, and other developers will step forward to continue his work.

Fabrizio Polacco will be missed.

On July 21st, 2002, Martin Butterweck (also known as blendi) died after battling leukemia. Martin was a young member of the Debian project who recently joined the project.

Martin Butterweck will be missed.

On May 9th Manuel Estrada Sainz (ranty) and Andrés García Solier (ErConde) were killed in a tragic car accident while returning from the Free Software conference held at Valencia, Spain.

Manuel Estrada Sainz and Andrés García Solier will be missed.

On July 30th Jens Schmalzing (jensen) died in a tragic accident at his workplace in Munich, Germany. He was involved in Debian as a maintainer of several packages, as supporter of the PowerPC port, as a member of the kernel team, and was instrumental in taking the PowerPC kernel package to version 2.6. He also maintained the Mac-on-Linux emulator and its kernel modules, helped with the installer and with local Munich activities.

Jens Schmalzing will be missed.

On July 18th Steve Greenland (stevegr) died of cancer. He was the maintainer of many core packages (such as cron) since he joined Debian in 1999.

Steve Greenland will be missed.

Frans Pop (fjp) died on August 20th. Frans was involved in Debian as a maintainer of several packages, a supporter of the S/390 port, and one of the most involved members of the Debian Installer team. He was a Debian listmaster, editor and release manager of the Installation Guide and the release notes, as well as a Dutch translator.

Frans Pop will be missed.

Adrian von Bidder (cmot) died on April 17th. Adrian was one of the founding members and secretary of debian.ch, he sparked many ideas that made Debian Switzerland be what it is today. Adrian also actively maintained software in the Debian package archive, and represented the project at numerous events.

Adrian von Bidder will be missed.

Ray Dassen (jdassen) died on May 18th. Ray was a Debian Developer for incredible 19 years. He joined the project in 1994, and continued to be an active contributor until his passing. Ray was one of the founding members of the Debian GNOME team, his friendliness and willingness to help fostered a spirit of collaboration within the GNOME team. He continued his involvement within Debian as the maintainer of several packages, most notably the Gnumeric spreadsheet.

Ray Dassen will be missed.

Peter Miller died on July 27th. Peter was a relative newcomer to the Debian project, but his contributions to Free and Open Source Software go back to the late 1980s. Peter was significant contributor to GNU gettext as well as being the main upstream author and maintainer of other projects that ship as part of Debian, including, but not limited to srecord, aegis and cook. Peter was also the author of the paper Recursive Make Considered Harmful.

Peter Miller will be missed.

Clytie Siddall died in February 2015. Clytie was a contributor of Vietnamese translations to Debian and other projects for many years. Within Debian she worked on translations for the installer, dpkg, apt and various documentation. She also contributed translations within the GNOME community and many other projects. Clytie was also a GNOME foundation member between 2005 and 2007.

Clytie Siddall will be missed.

Ian Murdock, the founder of the Debian Project and its community, died in December 2015. Ian was introduced to computers early in his life, he started actively programming at nine years of age. With the idea and the opportunity to make something better, he started the Debian Project in August of 1993. At that time, the whole concept of a "distribution" of Linux was new. Inspired as he said by Linus Torvalds' own sharing of Linux, he released Debian with the intention that this distribution should be made openly, in the spirit of Linux and GNU. Ian's dream lives on: Debian is made up of a strong community that has fostered development, growth, and wonder. It remains incredibly active with thousands of developers working untold hours to bring the world a reliable and secure operating system. Debian has sparked the interest, curiosity, and passion of those who want to make something better. Then, now, and far into the future.

The Debian 9 Stretch release was dedicated in his memory.

Ian Murdock will be missed.

Kristoffer H. Rose died on September 17th 2016 after a long battle with myelofibrosis. Kristoffer was a Debian contributor from the very early days of the project, and the upstream author of several packages, such as the LaTeX package Xy-pic and FlexML. On his return to the project after several years' absence, many of us had the pleasure of meeting Kristoffer during DebConf15 in Heidelberg.

Kristoffer H. Rose will be missed.

Innocent was a math teacher and a free software developer. One of his passions was tangram puzzles, which led him to write a tangram-like game that he later packaged and maintained in Debian. Soon his contributions expanded to other areas, and he also worked as a tireless translator into Catalan. Innocent de Marchi will be missed.

Lucy was a contributor within the Cambridge (UK) Debian community, helping to organise the Cambridge Mini-DebConf since several years. She was a strong fighter for diversity and inclusion, and participated in the creation of the Debian Diversity Team, working on increasing the visibility of under-represented groups and providing support with respect to diversity issues within the community. Lucy Wayland will be missed.

In June 2020, Robert Lemmen passed away after a serious illness. Robert had been regularly attending the Debian Munich meetups since the early 00s and helped with local booths. He had been a Debian Developer since 2007. Among other contributions, he packaged modules for Raku (Perl6 at that time) and helped other contributors to get involved in the Raku Team. He also put effort into tracking down circular dependencies in Debian. Robert Lemmen will be missed.

Karl Ramm passed away in June 2020, after complications due to metastatic colon cancer. He had been a Debian Developer since 2001 and packaged several components of MIT's Project Athena. He was passionate about technology and Debian, and always interested in helping others to find and promote their passions. Karl Ramm will be missed.

In April 2021, we lost Rogério Theodoro de Brito due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Rogério enjoyed coding small tools and had been a Debian contributor for more than 15 years. Among other projects, he contributed toward the use of Kurobox/Linkstation devices in Debian and maintained the youtube-dl tool. He also participated and was "Debian contact" in several upstream projects. Rogério Theodoro de Brito will be missed.

On 13th September 2023 Abraham Raji was involved in a fatal accident during a kayaking trip.

Abraham was a popular and respected Debian Developer as well a prominent free software champion in his home state of Kerala, India. He was a talented graphic designer and led design and branding work for DebConf23 and several other local events in recent years. Abraham gave his time selflessly when mentoring new contributors to the Debian project, and he was instrumental in creating and maintaining the Debian India website.

The Debian Project honors his good work and strong dedication to Debian and Free Software. Abraham’s contributions will not be forgotten, and the high standards of his work will continue to serve as an inspiration to others.

Debian Developer (since 2004) and Linux kernel hacker Peter "p2" De Schrijver passed away in July 2024. Many of us knew Peter as a very helpful and dedicated person and we valued his contributions to our project and the Linux community. Peter was a regular and familiar face in many conferences and meets across the world. Peter was highly regarded for his technical expertise in problem solving and for his willingness to share that knowledge. When asked "what are you working on?", Peter would often take the time to explain something you thought was extremely complicated understandably, or show you in- person his high technical proficiency in action on such tasks as translating a disassembled binary into C source code.

Peter's work, ideals, and memory leave a remarkable legacy and a loss that is felt around the world not only in the many communities he interacted with but in those he inspired and touched as well.

Peter De Schrijver (1970-09-17, Antwerp - 2024-07-12, Finland) will be missed.