We use u-boot at work, in completely uninteresting places. You don't think about it, it just is. Curl is probably a good equivalence - its pervasiveness is more impressive than its extremes.
Often someone's obituary gets posted on HN who was well known in some parts of the IT community, but not well known enough to have a Wikipedia page or a bio somewhere.
One thing that I usually want to know (and that's usually hard to find), and it's not out of morbid curiosity, is how old the person was and whether their death was sudden and tragic or more or less natural and expected.
I know the loss hurts in either case, but it's somehow much more comforting knowing that e.g. an 82 year-old kernel dev demi-god grandpa died in his sleep, having lived a long, fruitful life, than that some game dev prodigy in her late twenties got hit by a drunk driver.
RIP Wolfgang, I read a bit about your work and it sounds like you did enough good for several lives.
He was employed 25 years ago, at least long enough to be senior to the author of this post, so that puts a lower bound of 50 (which at least matches with how he looks in his profile on his company's about section).
He's a true OpenSource propagator, and a professional. In growing world of embedded systems, the importance of U-Boot is hard to overestimate. What a loss!
Very true, I have seen many people who won't go nearly as far in their professional life for supporting OSS, including myself. And U-boot is just incredible to say the least.
I still remember the first time when I collaborated with Wolfgang. He was such a kind and open minded person with a such a great value system.
Together with the amazing Denx crew we upstreamed all our custom CPU modules to the U-Boot source code. We also collaborated on the 2038 support within glibc, Linux Kernel and of course U-Boot.
I still remember when I did a demo of GitLab and Travis CI to Wolfgang and of course we also exchanged on personal topics such as nice restaurants in Usedom.
Once I explained Wolfgang about the pain of license compliance and shared the idea to use SPDX-License-Identifier. He agreed on solving this at the source code level like engineers would do and he made https://source.denx.de/u-boot/u-boot/-/commit/eca3aeb352c964... in 2013. Nowadays, this ended up within Linux Kernel and many other widely used open source projects.
He was a real pioneer and I'm so sad he passed away. I will always remember and wish all the best to family and friends!
Would also vote for the black banner treatment, U-Boot is pervasive. It runs on satellites in space, it runs on the phones in our pockets: https://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2006-December/018577....