William Lee Irwin III, Michael Schultheiss & Debian, Oracle, Russian kernel scandal
Early 2011, six months after the Debian Day volunteer suicide (Frans Pop), a mysterious livejournal blog appeared in Russian about a US-based kernel developer in trouble.
William Lee Irwin III was a kernel developer and Debian Developer who worked at Oracle. He pioneered support for page clustering on x86. After a medical problem or a seizure, it is suggested that Oracle simply dumped him in the street and he ended up in a homeless shelter.
Is America's health system really so bad that they need to rely on Russian support to keep kernel developers above the poverty line? (Yes, American healthcare really is that bad)
The Russian blog post is followed by a comment in English hinting that a debian-private (leaked gossip network) thread found a job for Irwin. We examined all messages in the thread and found the claim is over-optimistic.