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  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@dog.topology.org>
  To  : Evan Bourlotos <evan@cs.adelaide.edu.au>
  Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2001 20:21:32 +1030

Re: Werner Icking bicycle accident

On Thu, Feb 15, 2001 at 02:30:46PM +1000, Evan Bourlotos wrote:
> Sorry guys, but at the risk of speaking up and confirming I'm a fool....
> Who is/was Werner Icking?


Evan,

I should have explained for the people who are not linux
musicians - at least in the line of typesetting.

Werner made enormous contributions to the open source
music typesetting world. He contributed to the 
mutex/MusicTeX/MusixTeX software. He ran the mutex mailing list.
He hosted the best web page (as far as I know) on
free music typesetting resources:
http://www.gmd.de/Misc/Music/
I'm not sure of the full extent of his contributions.
I just know that in all of use of linux typesetting software,
his name seems to be on everything.
Everyone using linux for typesetting has benefitted from his work.
And I can tell you that there has not been a dry eye
on the mutex mailing list since his death was announced.

I think this just shows that if you give away a lot of free software,
then you will be better remembered by more people than
if you work for a closed source company.

The other name closely associated with open source typesetting
software is Daniel Taupin, who is still alive in France.

Admittedly, TeX is much broader than linux.
TeX was open source already when Linus was still
in shorts. (I'm just guessing here. But definitely TeX
had a big influence on many programmers to make them want
to be an open source programmer, including RMS, I think.)
But the TeX open source typesetting world and the
linux/BSD/etc. operating system worlds are strongly linked
by a common world-view.
And TeX really does work miles better on linux than
the current de facto monopoly OS.

Cheers,
Must get to the shops before they close....
Alan Kennington.

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