I have received message from his family that Jörg Schilling has
passed away from complications related to kidney cancer this sunday
around noon (CEST).
He will be remembered for his open source projects including
- cdrtools, the first portable CD burning program
- star, a powerful and fast tar implementation, the first to
use two processes with a shared ring buffer for better
performance.
- smake, a make implementation with autoconf features
- sformat, a versatile SCSI disk formatting program
- SING, an autoconf fork with a comprehensive set of libc
shims, providing a uniform API across operating systems
- ved, an early visual editor for the UNOS operating system (I believe)
- bosh, a carefully maintained fork of the Bourne shell
- sccs, a carefully maintained fork of SCCS. His attempts
to teach it projects and networking will remain unfinished.
- libfind, an implementation of find(1) as a library for
integration into other software.
- libxtermcap, an extended termcap library
- libscg, an early portable SCSI driver and library
He is also remembered for his commitment to open source, portability,
and his work on POSIX. He was working on adapting his software to
Z/OS and introducing message catalogues just weeks before his death.
Jörg worked for the Bethold typesetting company, one of the first
European customers of SUN microsystems. It is there that his love
for UNIX and SUN OS in particular was kindled. [1]
His interest in SUN OS culminated in Schillix, one of the first
open source Solaris distributions.
We will of course also remember him for his flames.
[1]:
https://web.archive.org/web/20061201103910/http://www.opensolaris.org/os/ar…
May his software immortalise him.
Robert Clausecker
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