[PLUG-TALK] Dirvish and Suicide

Keith Lofstrom keithl at kl-ic.com
Sun Jul 18 16:54:06 UTC 2004


I can use some other thoughts here.  I assume this belongs on plug-talk,
since it is about social issues and Linux, rather than specifics of code
and hardware.


Back in early March, I gave a talk to PLUG about Dirvish, a disk-to-disk
backup program.  The set of Perl scripts were developed by J.W. Schultz
as open source under the GPL.  I corresponded fairly frequently with the
author, including working over the slides for the talk, but I never did
learn much about him.  The talk went well, and Hal Pomeranz suggested a
magazine article for SysAdmin.  This seemed like good news for me and
J.W.  I wrote to him and got no reply.

Meanwhile, at about the same time, J.W. dropped out of sight. He was
a frequent poster to the Perl and Rsync mailing lists, sometimes to 
the Kernel list.  His company website, pegasys.ws, where Dirvish was
hosted, went offline sometime in May.

Yesterday (Saturday) I was contacted by another Dirvish contributor,
who found a newspaper article about J.W.'s death (apparently by suicide)
in mid-March.  The article mentioned his parents and sisters.

Urk...

Today:  there are contributors that want to continue development of
Dirvish.  I have set up dirvish.com and dirvish.org on my web server,
and copied a version of his site from the internet archives.  I will
be adding a wiki today, so the contributors can haggle.  I plan to
resume development in August.

The problem is, how do I contact his parents and sisters, and what do
I tell them?  I would also like to add some memorial material to the
dirvish site, which would require their help.   What is the best way
to go about that?   How will they react to the idea that J.W.'s
program is GPL, and this is not some gift from the grave?

The custom in our open-source community is clear - orphaned projects
may be picked up and developed by others.  However, outside of the
open source community, people still think "get rich selling software".
Combined with all the pain and hurt (and blame shifting) one can
expect from survivors of suicide, makes this sound like a land mine
situation.

I probably will be approaching the parents through the pastor of
their church (where the memorial services were held in March) and
perhaps that person can provide some guidelines, too.  Maybe some
of you have some experience here.


And as an aside, yes, the situation sucks in the software industry
right now, and some of you may have entertained thoughts of suicide. 
Suicide and depression come from a feeling of powerlessness, and that
can come from some mistaken-but-correctable beliefs.  I have gone
though quite a bit of that myself, and I can suggest some books,
particularly David Burns "Feeling Good - The New Mood Therapy".  We
need all the open-source contributors we can find, large and small
(and sometimes small turns out not to be small).  Let the Windows
fanatics commit suicide, OK?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts;

Keith

PS, I get plug-talk as a digest,  so if you want me to see your
response quickly you should CC it straight to me, keithl at ieee.org .

-- 
Keith Lofstrom           keithl at ieee.org         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs




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