Enlarge / Moolenaar in 2007. (credit: Sebastian Bergmann via Creative Commons )

Computing as we know it today was built in no small part by individuals who have written open source software—often for little to no personal financial gain—as well as by developers who use those tools. Few tools like that are as legendary and impactful as the Vim open source code editor, the first version of which was written and released by Dutch engineer Bram Moolenaar in 1991.

According to a note published by his family to Google Groups this week, Moolenaar passed away on August 3 at the age of 62. The post did not share his cause of death, stating only that he had been suffering from a medical condition for a few weeks. They wrote :

It is with a heavy heart that we have to inform you that Bram Moolenaar passed away on 3 August 2023.
Bram was suffering from a medical condition that progressed quickly over the last few weeks.

Bram dedicated a large part of his life to VIM and he was very proud of the VIM community that you are all part of.

The note goes on to say that they are arranging a Dutch-language funeral service in the Netherlands for Moolenaar, but that a date has not yet been set.

Enlarge / Ctrl IQ provided us with this diagram of its proposed technology stack. (Thankfully, spelling correction is not one of the core services Ctrl IQ offers.) (credit: Ctrl IQ)

Gregory Kurtzer, co-founder of the now-defunct CentOS Linux distribution, has founded a new startup company called Ctrl IQ which will serve in part as a sponsoring company for the upcoming Rocky Linux distribution.

Rocky Linux is to be a benefactor of Ctrl IQ's revenue, not its source—the company describes itself in its announcement as the suppliers of a "full technology stack integrating key capabilities of enterprise, hyper-scale, cloud and high-performance computing."

About Rocky Linux

If you've been hiding under a Linux rock for the last few months, CentOS Linux was the most widely-known and used clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Kurtzer co-founded CentOS Linux in 2004 with mentor Rocky McGaugh, and it operated independently for ten years until being acquired by Red Hat in 2014. When Red Hat killed off CentOS Linux in a highly controversial December 2020 announcement, Kurtzer immediately announced his intention to re-create CentOS with a new distribution, named after his deceased mentor.

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