Goodbye Spoon
I just discovered that spoon, aka Ian Truskett, has passed away.
I never met spoon, and had only exchanged a handful of emails with him. I maintain the Debian package of a perl module he wrote, libwww-shorten-perl (or WWW::Shorten). It’s an odd connection to have with someone, and now to realize that they died. I don’t know quite what to do about it.
It also reminds me that there are many small free software projects out there maintained by lone developers (I have several myself), and as the movement ages we need to figure out how to pass on the torch without too much disruption. Maybe we should all have something like a living will, expressing some sense of who should take up our projects when we’re gone.
I’m uploading spoon’s last release of WWW::Shorten into sid now, released just a few weeks before he died. It’s not much of a tribute, I know, but it’s the only thing I can think to do.
Jon Jan 28
Spoon was also liked a lot in the quite small Kwiki community. Ingy – the author of Kwiki has tributed him through the Spoon.pm which the new Kwiki will be based on.