RIP Andre Hedrick: The engineer who kept the PC open

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/26/andre_hedrick/

by rwrwrw • 14 years ago

89 24 14 years ago

theregister.co.uk

mp3geek• 14 years ago

You will be missed Andre :(

rwrwrw• 14 years ago

I hope he did not kill himself because of the the big layoffs at Cisco...

Udo• 14 years ago

I think a guy like that would not have any trouble finding another job. It's more likely he was suffering from severe depression, a complex and sometimes tragically undiagnosed illness. Sad to see him go. I see he died on the same day as my mom two weeks ago :-(

unimpressive• 14 years ago

Sometimes theres room for compromise.

But then, sometimes there isn't.

R.I.P

tux1968• 14 years ago

He always seemed a contentious and argumentative sort on LKML. So it was good to see that the author had a much different experience with him. Sad that Andre wasn't able to find a way to carry on. Thoughts and condolences to his family.

brilyient• 14 years ago

Wow. Thank you Mr. Hedrick for fighting the good fight and "keeping the PC open." We're still in the nascence of the computing era and I think many years from now, this man's efforts and the efforts of others like him will be viewed as being even more important than they are now.

RIP.

poweratom• 14 years ago

All I can think about is his four young children. The man took his own life, and that's that. But his kid didn't do anything to have deserved a childhood knowing their father committed suicide. Some of the kids may even blame themselves for a big chunk of their lives for what happened.

I wish he could have found a way and the courage to live on -- for the sake of his children.

A man having committed suicide is sad. But four children growing up without their father is a real tragedy.

tluyben24• 14 years ago

I know this sounds harsh, but from my own experience with friends and family (2 family members, 6 friends gone) committing suicide this was MANY years in the making; far before he had kids. That makes it a real shame; like many (most!) people, he shouldn't have had kids in the first place. I feel very sorry for them and his wife, this shouldn't have happened. And most likely could've been prevented. Especially with the kids in mind, this is a tough one.

Edit: changed wording out of respect

erre2• 14 years ago

I'm very glad to realise the two of you have never fought hard depression. Rest assured that he considered his children. It's not a rational decision.

andyjohnson0• 14 years ago

When someone dies in circumstances like this the people near to them are going to be very traumatised. Out of respect for them, you should keep your opinions to yourself. Using words like "unforgivable", "coward", and "duty" in the context of someone you appear not to have known is inappropriate and offensive.

yason2• 14 years ago

But his kid didn't do anything to have deserved a childhood knowing their father committed suicide.

But nobody deserves anything in life, neither good nor bad. What is good? What is bad? We have no promises for anything. Why things happen? For some reason unbeknownst to anyone, he and his closest people chose to participate in such a tragedy. It wasn't him choosing to commit suicide alone nor it wasn't his closest family members choosing to live through an event of suicide but that they all shared a bond that invited them to such a course of life where one of them takes his own life. Nobody knows why but nobody's in it for nothing. There are lessons to be learned and facts to be faced. People have to deal with things and that's why they're living their lives--to deal with things (that are uncomfortable). Some of the people might not make it, some might rise above. There's a course of life for everyone but it depends on how they take it, not what happened.

kruk• 14 years ago

'For some reason unbeknownst to anyone, he and his closest people chose to participate in such a tragedy. It wasn't him choosing to commit suicide alone'

What do you mean by "his closest people chose to participate in such a tragedy" and "it wasn't him choosing to commit suicide alone"?

SwellJoe• 14 years ago

I interacted with Andre on and off for years when running my first company. The company built hardware for web caching, which is a disk-limited task, so we were constantly on the edge of low-cost disk technology (we also built big SCSI boxes, but the low-end ATA boxes were much more popular), so we tickled lots of bugs in the ATA drivers, and shipped out lots of boxes running on his pre-release ATA drivers. It was always, always, always, a pleasure to work with him. Not because he was nice (though he was always more than civil to me, perhaps because my issue reports were concise and complete and reproduce-able), though he was nicer than some of the other folks we were working with (Han Reiser was perhaps the most cantankerous, aside from Linus). But, the important thing was that he was impressively competent. I'd send him a kernel oops and he'd fix it by the next day, sometimes after a couple of back-and-forth communications or having him login to a box where he could replicate it, usually along with an amusing explanation of why the hardware implementation was broken. I think it would be difficult to overstate how important he was during those important growth years for Linux; without reliable and fast hard disk drivers, a system is crippled, and he single-handedly built a significant portion of the ATA drivers during that period.

I never met him in person or knew him on a real personal level, but I considered him a great ally of the things I care most about (software freedom and reliable software, in particular). I hate to see him go, and I'm sorry his family has to go through this. I know that he inspired many developers to stand up for software freedom as well as technically sound implementations, not because he preached about it but because he lived it, every day.

chattr• 14 years ago

I knew him personally for last few years as his colleague. It was very saddening to know about his demise and shocking to know he took his life. He was always very jovial and cracking jokes all around. My heart goes out to his four children, who were aged between 5 to 14. While I knew he had some personal issues, but never thought these could lead him to suicide. I wish I knew more and did more. RIP Andre!

rehack• 14 years ago

I think I need to alert one thing - particularly on a page like this. If in your settings you have 'showDead' set to on, then you will see a incoherent comment at the bottom of this page from losethos.

Some of you folks might remember a discussion involving Losethos sometime back on HN. I can't find the discussion but here is the article which was discussed: http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html . In that article, one kind person had taken some effort to understand the reasons behind such incoherent comments.

I am not sure that people who marked the comment as dead, are aware of that discussion. Perhaps we need a policy at HN to handle such situations better.

PS: I got the above link by doing this search 'site:news.ycombinator.com losethos' on google. You can also see some more comments on the same here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4189669. But can't find that original discussion

RIP Andre Hedrick: The engineer who kept the PC open

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