Hello Connie,
Thanks for all the time and love you put into Scientific Linux. I really
appreciate your work on the distro and am one happy user running it on
all of my systems :) I wish you well and enjoy your retirement!
greetings,
Maarten
On 2017-02-24 22:52, Bonnie King wrote:
Friends,
The Scientific Linux team is at once happy and sad to announce Connie
Sieh's retirement after 23 years. Today is her last full-time day at
Fermilab.
Connie Sieh founded the Fermi Linux and Scientific Linux projects and
has worked on them continuously. She has sometimes preferred to toil
behind the scenes and leave public announcements to others, but has
always been a driving force behind the projects.
The Scientific Linux story started in the late 1990s when Connie's
group explored using commodity PC hardware and Linux as an alternative
to commercial servers with proprietary UNIX operating systems. From
the distributions available at the time, Red Hat Linux was chosen.
In 1998, Connie announced Fermi Linux at HEPiX, a semi-annual meeting
of High Energy Physics IT staff. Fermi Linux was a customized and
re-branded version of Red Hat Linux with some tweaks for integration
with the Fermilab environment. It also introduced an installer
modification called Workgroups, a framework to customize package sets
for use at different sites and for different purposes. The Workgroups
concept lives on today in the form of Contexts for SL7.
In October 2003 TUV changed their product model and introduced Red Hat
Enterprise Linux. Enterprise Linux was no longer freely distributed in
binary form, but sources remained available.
Connie and her colleagues started building from these sources,
creating one of the first Enterprise Linux rebuilds. A preview, dubbed
HEPL, was presented at spring HEPiX 2004. In May 2004, the rebuild was
released as Scientific Linux. The name was chosen to reflect the goals
and user base of the product.
Our colleagues at CERN collaborated, customizing and using Scientific
Linux as Scientific Linux CERN (SLC). SL became a standard OS for
Scientific Computing in High Energy Physics at Fermilab, CERN and
beyond.
SL is freely available to the general public, and is a popular
Enterprise Linux rebuild. As a result, it has built a community
outside of Fermilab and HEP.
With gratitude, the Scientific Linux team would like to recognize
Connie's many years of service and her immense contribution to the
project she founded.
Connie's outstanding technical and non-technical judgement are the
foundation of Scientific Linux. Her legacy will continue to inform the
way we run SL and we hope she'll remain as a collaborator.
All the best to Connie in her well-earned retirement. She will be
dearly missed!
