i got a call today from the mother of a friend, Scott. he was our first psychometrician at the Linux Professional Institute and one of the five founding members of the board. last summer he started acting strangely out of character and then he simply dissappeared. ultimately we had to replace him at LPI and we did, with great reluctance after he'd been gone for about six months. in point of fact i honestly thought he had died last year because his dissapearance was so far out of character (and i told him so) but then he resurfaced about 90 days ago when he started to phone me again, out of the blue.
after we founded LPI Scott and I and another friend (Tom Peters from the Netherlands) were a collaborative triumvirate developing the first level of LPI's certification tests and we were always on the phone or email discussing the work. the work became our social life! in fact, Scott and I knew each other over the net and on the phone for more than a year before we ever met in person (at LBE in Lost Wages!). while the three of us were pounding out the technical side of the tests dyork and Evan Leibovitch were running around with their hair on fire promoting the project. so we were all insanely busy!
needless to say i was very glad to hear from Scott. it turns out (according to today's call from his mother) that he had been battling a serious downturn with diabetes and it had affected his mind (yet he did not admit this to me, ever!). just two weeks ago he and i talked for an hour or so on the phone. he sounded lucid and said he was looking for work but having a hard time with it and that he hadn't been feeling very well. while we were talking something happened to his phone and we got disconnected, i called him back in spite of the fact that i was busy as hell (i'm glad that i did) and he said he was grateful i had called back because he was feeling down and was reluctant to take up any more of my time. i told him i didn't mind.
when she called today his mother told me that Scott passed away two weeks ago, alone, in a motel in Arkansas. i think he was 29. after i made the announcement on the LPI mailing lists this afternoon my friend Tom Peters called me from the Netherlands. we didn't talk long because transatlantic calls aren't cheap but we remembered Scott for moment or two, together. i will miss Scott. he was my friend.
Scott would have loved advogato had he still been on the net during the last year or two. he wrote some awesome python code for LPI so he would have fit in really well here. with that in mind i was thinking about the contributions he made to LPI (considerable!) and I searched through the archives to find some of the things Scott said when we were first trying to get LPI up and running. i found this and thought i'd end this note by quoting him:
"On a philosophical note, I would hope that the certification process reflects the spirit of the free/open-source software movement as much as possible. I would like to see certification develop to be as "free" and open as possible. By this I mean that all guidelines and policies should be developed in public and made available to all. While the exam and/or hands-on evaluation will have to have specific standards, the means of training and preparing should not be specified by the project. So there should not be a requirement to attend training classes or to buy a specific training course. Let multiple commercial and free preparation methods be developed."
--Scott Murray
i doesn't seem strange at all that what Scott was hoping for in November of 1998 (notice the message number from the archive) is a reality in June of 2001. Scott, you made it real!
peace.