Dear Linux hackers,

Sorry for the intrusion on this technical list. I wanted to let Andre's fellow 
Linux developers know that he died this past weekend. For those that don't know 
him, Andre was an active developer for the ATA driver a while back.

I have known Andre for about 9 years, although I haven't seen much of him in 
the past year. He and I attended several retreats together in 2002 and 2003. 
I'd like to share a story from the first time I met him.

I was a FreeBSD developer at the time and had done some work in the SCSI (CAM) 
subsystem. I met Andre at a retreat center in the Marin woods. As we ate 
dinner, he mentioned that he was a software developer. "So am I", I said.

"I work on code for handling disk drives," he continued. "So do I, at least in 
my spare time," I replied. "I work on Linux," he said. "FreeBSD is better," I 
joked. He took the insult in fine fashion.

"To work on disk drivers, you have to be a special kind of bastard," he said, 
his eyes sparkling. "Are you something of a jerk? All the good storage 
programmers are." We both laughed, and began recounting arguments on various 
mailing lists about error recovery, queuing, etc.

I saw him a few times in Berkeley after that. His wife and kids were often with 
him. He, like all of us, was a real person, not just a personality on a mailing 
list. I've always thought kindly of Andre, and like many of us, he had high 
standards and an impatience to make things better. I have a lot of respect for 
people like that.

I'm sorry to bring this news to you, and I'll miss him.

Sincerely,
Nate

--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/

Reply via email to