Chris Rutter, ARM Ltd IPO, Winchester College & Debian
[Article 7 months old]
Reprinted with permission from disguised.work.
ARM Ltd finally went public on 14 September, the stock jumping 25% on its first day of trading.
Volunteers have recently started picking over the story of Chris Rutter, who was seen to be working up to 3am doing unpaid voluntary work for ARM Ltd & Debian at the same time he started his undergraduate studies in Cambridge.
Rutter was killed crossing the road. Police suggested the driver was not at fault. Was Rutter burning both ends of the candle?
Early investors and those employees who were given stock options have made a killing. Rutter, who invested his youth and gave his life, got nothing, either did his family.
Some of the more startling revelations include the fact that Rutter was both underage and unpaid when he first started doing ARM Linux work. Here is the email from Wookey confirming that ARM Linux servers were running in Rutter's former high school, the posh Winchester College:
To: Debian ARM <debian-arm@lists.debian.org> Subject: ARM port rearrangements From: Wookey <wookey@aleph1.co.uk> Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2001 13:52:37 +0000 (GMT) Message-id: <Marcel-1.50-0312135237-f7fh+Ty@chewy.aleph1.co.uk>
Hello people,
Due to the untimely demise of Chris Rutter we are now short of an ARM port leader, and need to do things about the ARM infrastrucutre in the reasonably short term.
Fortunately the distributed nature of Debian is resistant to this sort of disaster so things are basically still working fine. As, in practice, Phil Blundell has been doing a great deal of the work recently then I suggest that unless he disagrees violently, or someone else is keen to get the title, that he becomes de facto leader. (This makes no practical difference except that I update the ARM port page to this effect shortly and we all have to buy him beer if we meet in the flesh.)
Sorting out the build machines is slightly more complicated. Currently the machines medusa (a RiscPC, owned by chris) and inkvine (an x86 box, owned by the school) do most of the work. These boxes are both located at Winchester college (chris's old school) and got bandwidth for free. Ths arrangement was becoming increasingly tenuous anyway but now clearly ceases to be pratical. It's not in immediate danger of closure, but at some point we need to run this stuff on machines we have some control over.
So, we are now casting about for resources to keep things going smoothly. Anyone want to offer bandwidth/co-location space, hardware etc? Essentially transferring the existing setup to new hosts is the path of least resistance. If we find out what's available we can work out how best to proceed. I suspect hardware isn't a problem - we need bandwidth and a keen webmaster/maintainer would be handy too.
Wookey -- Aleph One Ltd, Bottisham, CAMBRIDGE, CB5 9BA, UK Tel (00 44) 1223 811679 work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/ play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/
Chris Rutter's home address and home phone number were placed in a public directory as an official contact for ARM Linux support. █
