Ettore passed away suddenly last night. We will all miss him- it’s very hard to be a Monkey right now.
I used to tell people that open source was a great working environment, because when I first got involved with open source (through LegOS) I met with and talked once with an Italian, and I thought that was the greatest thing ever- to meet and talk with someone so far away. Then I got even luckier, and I got to work with an Italian every single day. And that was incredibly exciting, because he was just an awesome person to work with and around.
It’s hard to post this- my words don’t at all do him or the tragedy justice. But I guess I can say I tried. We’ll miss you, dude…
[Later]
Finally found a picture of Ettore that does him some justice. If anyone has the picture of him that used to be on duderino.org, please let me know- archive.org seems to have lost it and it’s sort of the way I’d like to remember him, odd as that may seem to anyone who saw it.
[Much Later] I’ve never had so many message tabs open before- lots of people really wanted to share memories and ease pain. Ximian is very much a family, and GNOME is too, even if that is only background noise behind the technical bits sometimes.
[Even Later] I found the duderino pic and put it here. That’s always going to be the ettore face, to me.