On 9/16/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@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