Obits
In memoriam of Karsten Loesing
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Friday 25th of December 2020 06:10:41 PM Filed under
It's with deep sorrow that we share that our dear friend, colleague, and Tor core contributor Karsten Loesing passed away on the afternoon of Friday, December 18, 2020. No one is prepared for such an unimaginable loss. Our deepest sympathies go to Karsten's family at this moment, his wife and his children.
Karsten was part of the Tor community for 13 years and an amazing, smart, thoughtful, and gentle person who has touched us all. Over the course of these years we saw him not only grow as a colleague at Tor but as a father to his family. His positive, attentive, and kind presence helped us grow as people as well.
Dr. Karsten Loesing joined Tor in 2007 as a Google Summer of Code student to work on Distributed Tor Directory, and earned his PhD in Computer Science at Germany’s University of Bamberg in 2009 on a Tor-related topic, "Distributed Storage for Tor Hidden Service Descriptors".
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Mourning Dan Kohn
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Monday 2nd of November 2020 06:09:52 PM Filed under
The net today carries the sad news that Dan Kohn has passed away. Among other things, Dan played a huge role in the establishment of the Linux Foundation and a number of its initiatives, including the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and LF Public Health. He will be missed.
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Announcement of the passing of Jari Fredriksson
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 22nd of September 2020 01:15:23 AM Filed under

Some know that Jari's mirror broke a few weeks ago and we've been trying to reach him. I am sorry to announce that Jari Fredriksson was a great supporter of the project running an sa-update mirror, helping with our masscheck program, testing releases, and just generally being a great member of our community. On behalf of the entire project, I'd like to extend our condolences to him and his family. He will be missed. If anyone wishes to send a note of condolences it can be done through Jouni, his employer. http://www.jounivirtanenconsulting.com/contact/ Sincerely, Kevin A. McGrail
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We are very sad to announce that José Jorge, who used the login zezinho, passed away on September the 11th
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 14th of September 2020 09:47:28 PM Filed under

José was 46 years old, father to 3 children. He, and his 16 year old son, who was accompanying him on a bicycle ride, died September the 11th after being struck by a car.
José was a major contributor to the world of Free Software, in particular Mageia, his favorite distribution, which he had adopted after Mandrake/Mandriva and in which he had been actively participating for some 20 years. Among his many contributions were the inclusion of hundreds of packages such as Audacity, Chromium, fuse2, gcompris, other very important packages such as various WiFi drivers, as well as many games (bzflag, alienarena, crack-attack, flightgear). He was a tester
for Mageia Cauldron and a mentor for new packagers.
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Remembering Thomas Gilliard (satellit)
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 5th of August 2020 03:35:03 AM Filed under

I’m sad to report that Thomas Gilliard (satellit), who was a valued member of the QA team for many years, passed away last week. His wife contacted me with the news. Thomas was a regular and reassuring presence at QA and blocker review meetings and ran many thousands of tests since he first joined the team in 2009. He was particularly dedicated to testing our Sugar builds. We’ll miss him.
Also: Implementation of varlink support for libnmstate – GSoC’20 nmstate project
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We mourn the loss of John McDonough
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Friday 24th of April 2020 04:50:44 PM Filed under
We learned this week of the passing of John McDonough (jjmcd). John was a long-time contributor to the Fedora Project, and we are sad to hear of his passing. John contributed heavily to the Documentation team, sharing his knowledge with a global user community. John didn’t just write documentation, he also mentored new contributors. He was a patient and caring mentor, and our community is worse for his loss.
When I first became a Fedora contributor 11 years ago, John was one of the people who welcomed me into the Docs team. His guidance helped me become a better contributor. Although he stepped back from contributing a few years ago, his impact continues.
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Mozilla: RIP Youghourta Benali and WebGPU Update
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 24th of April 2020 02:32:35 PM Filed under


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Mozilla Localization (L10N): L10n Report: April 2020 Edition
Before we get into the report, we must share that Youghourta Benali, one of the Arabic l10n community’s managers, has passed away due to prior health issues. He was a passionate activist for the open Web and Arabic’s presence on the Web, localizing Mozilla projects for over 7 years. We’ll all miss him and wish his family and friends peace at this time. The surviving Arabic managers are currently writing a guest post that we’ll post here when ready.
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WebGPU Support Begins Coming Together In Firefox Nightly Builds
The latest Firefox Nightly builds have the experimental WebGPU support working in early form. WebGPU is the W3C-backed web standard for modern graphics and compute that is based upon concepts from the likes of Vulkan and Direct3D 12.
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A Taste of WebGPU in Firefox
The group has mostly resolved the major architecture issues of the API. Recently we agreed on the WebGPU Shading Language direction based on the Tint prototype. We still need to solve a lot of design riddles before we make it available to end users to write shaders in.
One of the unresolved issues is the API for data transfers between CPU and GPU. Working with memory directly is where the web platform differs greatly from native platforms. We’ve discussed a dozen different proposals but have not yet found a design solution that fulfills our principles.
Overall, the spec is still heavily a work in progress. It’s available for early hackers but not recommended for any use in production yet. We are hoping to get a minimum-viable-product version of the spec and implementations by the end of 2020. The current state of implementations can be checked on webgpu.io.
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Farewell to Oier Echaniz Beneitez
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Saturday 18th of April 2020 05:16:25 PM Filed under

We received the very sad news today, that Oier Echaniz Beneitez has passed away, after a long-term illness (not as a result of COVID-19).
Oier was one of the initiators for bringing EuroPython to Bilbao in 2015 and co-chaired the conference in both 2015 and 2016, together with Fabio...
He was one of the most enthusiastic and engaged organizers of the conference, served on the EuroPython Society board from 2015 - 2017 and founded and chaired the local Python organization in San Sebastian (PySS, pronounced “peace”). Oier also started the pyjok.es project, together with Alexandre Savio and Ben Nuttall, inaugurating the first Python Jokes-as-a-Service of its kind.
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Octavio Mendez Passed Away 29
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Friday 10th of April 2020 06:14:13 PM Filed under
It is with great sadness that I must report we lost a great community member today. Octavio Mendez, a long-time cornerstone of the Mexican Blender and open source community, has passed away after fighting the Corona virus.
Claudio Malefico Andaur contacted me about this, and shared the following...
Also: For real...
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Sad news about Scott Rifenbark
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Friday 31st of January 2020 11:48:51 PM Filed under
I'm sorry to have to pass on the sad news that Scott Rifenbark, our
tech writer for the project passed away on Wednesday after a battle
with cancer.
I remember interviewing Scott over 10 years ago when forming a team at
Intel to work on what became the Yocto Project, he was with it from the
start. He warned me he wasn't an entirely traditional tech writer but I
warned we weren't aiming to be a traditional project either. It was a
great match. He stayed with the project ever since in one way or
another, he enjoyed working on the project and we enjoyed working with
him.
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