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LWN: Remembering Seth Nickell and In Memoriam: Tomáš Kalibera
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Remembering Seth Nickell
LWN has received the sad news that Seth Nickell passed away, on April 16, from his father, Eric Nickell:
Many of you knew Seth from his work in the GNOME Usability Project, but his roots in that community trace back to his high school years. As a father of a high school junior, I remember being terrified when he flashed the hard drive of a computer he purchased for himself with this weird "Linux" thing. And I was a bit awed by the college application essay he wrote about open source and Linus Torvalds.
It was his interest in packet radio that drew him into working with the Linux AX.25 HOWTO as a high schooler, and from there to his focus on making the Linux desktop work for everyone.
The family plans to share news of a memorial at a later time. He will be deeply missed.
In Memoriam: Tomáš Kalibera
We have received the sad news that Tomáš Kalibera, a member of the R Project core team, has passed away after a short illness.
A friend who knew him well wrote to me: he was very happy, and his work fulfilled him. That is, perhaps, the best thing one can say about a life in open source — that the work mattered, that it reached millions, and that the person who did it found meaning in it.
Kalibera was mentioned in this 2019 article about C programs passing strings to Fortran subroutines. He will be greatly missed.
Update
Words from people in the know:
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Jonathan Blandford: Remembering Seth
I heard the news about Seth Nickell’s passing last week, and have been in a bit of a funk ever since.
Seth was brilliant, iconoclastic, fearless.
It’s been a long while since Seth was an active part of the GNOME Community, but his influence on the project can still be seen in its DNA if you know where to look. He arrived on the GNOME scene while still in school with hundreds of ideas on how to improve things. It was an interesting time: We had just launched GNOME 1.5 and were searching for a new path towards GNOME 2.0. The Sun usability study had been published and the community had internalized the need to change directions. Seth rolled up his sleeves and did the work needed to help light that path.
Seth championed radical proposals such as instant apply, button ordering, message dialog fixes, and more. He cleaned up the control-center proposing some of the most visible changes from GNOME 1 to 2. He also did the initial designs for epiphany, pushing for a cleaner browser experience during an era of high browser complexity. He had a vision of desktops as a democratic tool, as easy and natural to use as any other tool in the human experience.