News has recently been circulating about the passing of Peter De Schrijver (p2), an NVIDIA employee and Debian Developer.
Before we begin fact checking, we want to express our most sincere sympathies to his family and friends who must be missing him a lot right now.
Given the history of cover-ups around the Debian deaths, which include a bona-fide suicide cluster, we need to be careful to fact check every piece of information that appears at this tragic moment in the history of Debian.
The notice published by Debianists doesn't make any reference to cause of death. It simply states:
The Debian Project mourns the sudden passing of our fellow developer and friend, Peter De Schrijver.
They have chosen the two words sudden passing to characterize the circumstances.
There are some other articles elsewhere.
There is a LinkedIn post from Mind Software Consultancy.
They tell us:
Last week, p2 passed away in a hospital in Helsinki after a brief illness.
There is a post in LWN. They do not mention an illness.
There is a a condolence document being circulated by his family. It is written in Dutch (Flemish). Notably, it does not mention the "illness" that was referred to by the LinkedIn post. It looks like the word "illness" arrived through a process of Chinese Whispers. Here is what the family really wrote:
Vol ongeloof en met pijn in ons hart, ...
...
en onverwachts overleden
Here is the actual translation of the key words into English:
With disbelief and pain in our hearts, ...
...
and died unexpectedly
The same document notes that he died at the Meilahti Tower Hospital.
Here is a list of facilities at the hospital.
It is Helsinki's largest hospital and it provides a wide range of services, including emergency room facilities and day surgeries.
At such times, it is very important that people do not introduce references to an "illness" if that was never suggested by his family.
Volunteers note that De Schrijver, being of Flemish origin, would have identified with Frans Pop, the volunteer who chose Debian Day for a suicide in the Netherlands. It is not clear how well these two knew each other, if at all.
Debianists worked hard to cover up the suicide cluster. The Debian suicide cluster has recently been thrust into public view by the use of lawyers to harass the Debian volunteers. The presence of a suicide cluster always tells you something about the wider group of people.
The police in Finland have a page in English explaining that information about the cause of death is not made public by any official source. This means that the next of kin of a deceased person can choose the manner in which they explain a death to the wider family, friends and colleagues of the deceased.
The police are obliged to examine a death in certain cases, including medical treatment:
the death was caused by a crime, accident, suicide, poisoning, occupational disease or medical treatment or there is reason to suspect that one of these was the cause of death
Here is the paragraph about confidentiality:
When the investigation is completed, the police inform relatives about the results. Information about the cause of death is confidential, and the police can give it only based on specific grounds.
We found some of De Schrijver's writing in the debian-private (leaked) gossip network. In this particular message he shows that he sided with the people who were skeptical about having systemd forced on Debian:
Subject: Re: how Debian is bring trolled Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2014 08:13:11 +0300 From: Peter 'p2' De Schrijver <p2@debian.org> To: debian-private@lists.debian.org On 2014-10-18 05:11:36 (-0700), Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> wrote: > On Sat, Oct 18, 2014 at 01:36:37PM +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote: > > On 10/18/2014 11:25 AM, Eduard Bloch wrote: > > > Thanks for this excellent summary. I have really liked systemd for a > > > while until that started happening to my workstation and the current > > > state of #740942, #763028, 758157, 740942, 759358, 761953, 762002, > > > 762087, #764569, #764615 (and probably tons of others, that was just a > > > quick check) could make me cry. > > > Those are all issues specific to Debian, none of them arise in Fedora, > > for example. > > How does that make it any better? How is this not exactly what I argued > before the TC decision was made, that there was a significant body of > integration work to be done for systemd in Debian before it should be > considered releasable? > > > And honestly, the person who thought it would be a good idea to call the > > smbd and nmbd init scripts from the samba init script deserves to be > > tarred and feathered. > > Thanks for your adherence to the Code of Conduct. > > > It's an evil hack and nothing you should blame systemd for. The fact > > that it works with sysvinit is because the author just tested it > > on sysvinit. > > So systemd has undocumented assumptions about how SysV init scripts are > supposed to work, but it's somehow an evil hack for scripts to have been > tested with the default init system in Debian instead of with an > alternative. Ok then. > > > The proper solution to our problems with systemd in Debian is to > > fix our set of scripts and configuration files and not to put > > blame onto upstream. > > The blame lies with those who have pushed half-baked solutions for our core > system, whether those people are upstream or otherwise. > Correct! -- Please respect the privacy of this mailing list. Some posts may be declassified 3 years after posting as per http://www.debian.org/vote/2005/vote_002 Archive: file://master.debian.org/~debian/archive/debian-private/ To UNSUBSCRIBE, use the web form at <http://db.debian.org/>.
In this message, De Schrijver tells us he was aware of and saddened by the death of Thiemo Seufer who was doing Debian work on Christmas Day and then died.
Subject: Re: Thiemo Seufer Date: Sat, 27 Dec 2008 14:08:34 +0200 From: Peter 'p2' De Schrijver <p2@debian.org> To: Martin Michlmayr <tbm@cyrius.com> CC: debian-private@lists.debian.org, aurelien@aurel32.net On 2008-12-26 19:20:03 (+0100), Martin Michlmayr <tbm@cyrius.com> wrote: > I'm sorry to inform you that Thiemo Seufer died in a car accident > this morning. I was told that a big, fast moving car collided with > his car, forcing his car from the high way. > > Thiemo was the lead maintainer of our MIPS ports and a great > person. His death is a great loss to us all. Sad to hear this :( Peter.
Wouter Verhelst posted a blog about the Debian "sarge" release party in Leuven, Belgium. The date of the blog is 11 June 2005. Wouter tells us that both Peter 'p2' de Schrijver and Frans Pop were at the party.
The Debian wiki has a page about a Debian QA meeting on 9 to 11 September 2005 where both de Schrijver and Pop were present.
Peter 'p2' de Schrijver and Frans Pop were both present at the DebConf6 in Oaxtepec, Mexico. That is the DebConf where the Debianists made a violent attack on Ted Walther, a candidate in the DPL elections.
Here are some photos we found in a gallery. It looks like Frans Pop and Peter de Schrijver did know each other after all. They are in various pictures at the same event.
p2 is waving goodbye:
A photo of Peter de Schrijver taken a few years later:
Please see more blogs about Debian unexplained deaths, including the suicides and accidents.
