[Foundation-l] Rob Levin of irc.freenode.net has passed away :-(

[Kelly Martin]

On 9/16/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> According to operators of FreeNode.net, Rob Levin, who was the
> President of the Peer-Directer Projects Center which operates
> irc.freenode.net, has passed away in an accident. Slashdot has a
> summary here:
> http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/16/2152243

Rob and I go back around ten years.  We first met on #gimp on
irc.gimp.org, where I used to be a regular (as a lead developer on the
GIMP).  I don't remember when I started visiting the Open Projects
servers, exactly, but it couldn't have been much later than 1999 or
2000.  I remember long discussions with him about Advogato's trust
metric (Rob originally became a Master there because of my
certification) around that time.  Later on, Rob more or less recruited
me me to help combat the overt sexism and homophobism in some of Open
Projects' more heavily populated channels, something which I
admittedly did not have much luck with.  I drifted away from open
source (I've been gainfully employed as a Windows administrator for
the past several years) and haven't done any serious development in
the past few years, but I've never managed to stay away from the
freenode servers very long.  Rob was a good friend with whom I have
shared many hours in IRC conversation and many kilobytes of mailed and
blogged discussion (if you can call Advogato a "blog").  He will be
sorely missed.

Kelly