Missing a fallen soldier
Tuesday, 15. May 2007, 21:09:30
Today I woke up to the news that a member of the OpenOffice.org community, Gerry Roderick Singleton passed away from a heart stroke on May 12th. The shocking part for me at least, was that I got his Linkedin invitation that same day.The email from Charles Schultz:
Date: Tue, 15 May 2007 12:13:47 +0200
From: Charles-H. SCHULZ <charles-h.schulz@laposte.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Subject: Gerry Singleton passed away
Apologies for cross-posting.
Gerry Singleton, our documentation project co-lead
(http://documentation.openoffice.org), just passed away from a sudden
heart attack.
More information on the dev@documentation lists. It’s a very sad day for
OpenOffice.org as we lost an invaluable volunteer; Gerry was one of our
oldest contributors and although I’ve never met him physically, I felt
that he was a friendly and warm presence in our Noosphere. My thoughts
go to his family and his friends.
May he rest in peace. Goodbye Gerry, see you one of these days up there.
Charles-H. Schulz.
After that I followed to verify he was the same person, in shock I discovered that he was the same person. I most say that I didn’t have a strong link to him since he worked in a different project.
His project was the documentation project at http://documentation.openoffice.org. The documentation recently was reinventing itself with the help of OOoAuthors.
I was so interested that I went on to view his linkedin which gave me links to his blogs and his website. I discover that he is also involved in other FLOSS groups like CLUE in Canada which is a group to enforce open source in the Canadian government. He also was an independent consultant owning his own firm PATH tech.
At a senior stage age, he seemed very modern and Web 2.0′ish. On a note at CLUE I also discover he was into Drupal. His friend Evan made a post that describe him earlier that day where they went to DrupalCon in Toronto.
I spent some time at his comany site where he also had some pictures from his family. It seems his family is already on a third generation of off-springs and he was full of new grandkids. All in all even thoght I never met him I could picture him as a happy exciting geek that geekout till the last day.
I am happy of seen that he lived a full and plenty life and he really went all the way till the last day about changing the world and making it more open.
WIDGETIZE