Friday, March 28th at the young age of 38. The Linux community has lost a great friend and advocate. In addition to maintaining the LSPH all these years Mike was also a Navy Sonar Instructor, Reserve Police Officer, President and founding member of TSCNet, Treasurer and founding member of the Kitsap Peninsula Linux User Group and contributor to various Open Source projects such as the PHP SNMP module and the Sharp Camera package for OpenZaurus.
You may notice that the last update of the Linux Shadow Password HOWTO was v1.5, 7 April 1998. This isn’t because he lost interest, but because the HOWTO did its job. It convinced everyone to start including shadow password support in their distribution by default, making the HOWTO unnecessary.
When Mike took on a new project he dove in head-first. When he found bugs he’d fix them and contribute the patches back to the project. When he found a lack of support for some feature he would add it himself. He set an example for what a true Linux hacker ought to be, demanding excellence and openness from the software and helping to improve it where there were flaws.
Mike’s passing has deeply effected all of his family and friends; we will miss him greatly. We have gathered together the pieces of his homepage (he wasn’t too good at updating it, and parts of it came from www.archive.org) and reassembled it along with other links at http://www.kplug.org/~mhjack
If you have some memories of Mike that you would like to share, please email them to bcl@brianlane.com and I’ll add them to his homepage, or post them to the KPLUG messageboard at http://www.kplug.org/“
Link: kplug.org
