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read moreFOSS luminaries ignore Ritchie's passing
Sam Varghese
Monday, 24 October 2011 08:57
Twelve days ago, the computing pioneer Dennis Ritchie was found dead at the age of 70. News of his demise was broken to the world by a former colleague, Rob Pike, who worked alongside him at Bell Labs.
Given that Ritchie was not a great self-promoter, the degree to which people have taken notice of his passing has been much less than that of Steve Jobs, a known show-pony.
What is really sad about this lack of acknowledgement is that many people and writers who do recognise events that are newsworthy in the field of computing have turned a blind eye - or else issued something that's similar to weak tea.
Take Richard Stallman, the head of the Free Software Foundation, for example. Stallman has much to thank Ritchie for; were it not for the C programming language that Ritchie developed, Stallman would not have been able to create any of the GNU tools that he did, in his quest to create a free operating system.
Stallman had time to comment on the passing of Steve Jobs. Yet, to date, neither him nor anyone else at the FSF or the GNU Foundation have said a word about Ritchie.
The Linux Foundation, that august body dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux, has plenty of technical expertise to draw on. Yet all that it could do was to ask a marketing person to write something. Amanda McPherson has her strong points, no doubt, but she could hardly be expected to do justice to a man of Ritchie's greatness.
Another prominent person in the Linux community who, more or less, has ignored Ritchie's death, is Jonathan Corbet, the editor of Linux Weekly News, a site which claims to be "dedicated to producing the best coverage from within the Linux and free software development communities."
Yet all that Corbet could do when someone like Ritchie passed on was to provide a link to Pike's three-line entry in Google+. Corbet accepts outside contributions and has at least one writer on staff; obviously writing a tribute to Ritchie was not one of his priorities, not till today at least.
Linux is 95 per cent C - and Corbet is well aware of this fact. Some acknowledgement of the debt that is owed to Ritchie would have been in order.
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