The GNU Emacs developer mailing list recently announced the death of a maintainer: Goodbye to Thien-Thi Nguyen , and stated that his death is a huge loss to the free software world.
According to the description of the email, Thien-Thi Nguyen (ttn) passed away in October 2022. He was a hacker, artist, writer, and a long-term maintainer and contributor of many GNU programs and other free software.
ttn served as the GNU maintainer of the rcs, guile-sdl, alive, and superopt packages, while also developing GNU Go.
Thien-Thi is particularly fond of GNU Emacs, GNU Taler, and GNU Go. He is the author and maintainer of the xpm, gnugo, ascii-art-to-unicode, and hideshow GNU Emacs packages, and has made significant contributions to many other packages. Contributions to other software packages such as vc, GNU Taler and its documentation.
In the discussion about ttn's death on Hacker News , someone mentioned something ttn said:
"Emacs is the ground. We run around and act silly on top of it, and when we die, may our remnants grace its ongoing incrementation."
Emacs is the earth. We "run wild" as much as we can on it. When we die, may our remains continue to grow.