In December 2003 OpenLab ran a cybercafe on thin-client technology for the inaugural Idlelo conference. While I was manning the post, a man walked in with an air of confident self-assurance rarely found among the programming maturity where shy withdrawn or excessive exuberance tend to be more the norm.
We were quickly talking and immediately gelled as I spoke about our technologies and his questions showed a keen interest in how the system worked and performed – the interest of a true geek.
“May I put it to the test ?” he asked, and I nodded – slightly worried but well aware that my very reputation was at stake.
In a matter of seconds, he coded a fork-bomb and ran it, when my server hadn’t crashed after nearly 5 minutes of it, he declared “that will do”.
That man, was Guido Sohne and this was our first meeting. Since Guido lived far away, we didn’t see each other often, but we did meet up at many conferences and always took time for a chat, his work with FOSSFA and other FOSS organizations in Africa would grow to be legendary.
He was one of our few true geeks at heart, as much concerned with the social impact of his actions as the code he loved. We could spend hours debating – but it was always a good humored debate.
Today, reading the announcement that Africa has established an open-source fellowship in memory of him, was the first I heard that he had passed away almost 2 weeks ago. Of course, our friendship was one of the online world – so that I didn’t get the news right away is hardly surprising.
Nonetheless, it came as a shock since Guido was still very young and in my experience of him lived a surprisingly healthy lifestyle for a geek.
Still, these things do happen – and this fellowship is perhaps the most fitting memoir that could be given to Guido for his work on the open-source side of things. That he was equally concerned with the free-software side is also worth remembering.
He dedicated his life to this movement, and he will be sorely missed. Africa and our fledgling FOSS movement is far poorer for having lost him.
