RIP Daniel Bristot de Oliveira, Red Hat death
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
News has emerged about the tragic, untimely and sudden death of Daniel Bristot de Oliveira, a Brazilian-Italian employee of IBM Red Hat.
Our first thoughts at this time should be with his family, friends and colleagues.
Daniel Bristot de Oliveira is somebody who really gave a lot of his life to Linux and open source, through his education, through his employment and through the community commitments in his free time.
It is a chilling coincidence that he died like this exactly one year after Red Hat decided to divide the community further by restricting access to RHEL source code.
Looking through Bristot's works, I found a list of all the talks and lectures he gave in his lifetime.
One stood out to me, a talk he gave at Computer on the beach 2015 in Florianópolis, Brazil. It is all in Portuguese but the meaning is clear. Here are the slides. In this particular slide, Bristot is telling people about companies who block what you can do with the source code.
E quais são os nossos recursos?(ok, falando em software)
Conhecimento...
Que se fechado... Te bloqueia!
Que se aberto...
Transforma o seu conhecimento em seu próprio bloqueio
Mas é bem ai que gostamos de estar!
Those are the words chosen by Bristot himself, emphasized with the exclaimation mark at the end too.
I couldn't help noticing the similarities to the unexplained death of Adrian von Bidder in 2011.
von Bidder and Bristot both spent a lot of time on community activities. von Bidder was a founder of debian.ch and had a role in the committee. Obituaries for Bristot comment on his role in organizing conferences.
von Bidder and Bristot both wrote blog posts about a wide range of issues, both technical and ethical. Blog of Adrian von Bidder (cached) and blog of Daniel Bristot de Oliveira.
von Bidder and Bristot were both recently married and both were yet to have children.
von Bidder was 34 when he died, Bristot was 37, they are both well below the mean age for heart attack victims.
von Bidder's community (Debian) and Bristot's community (IBM Red Hat) had both experienced dramatic changes before the death. In the case of von Bidder, he died very soon after the rise of Ubuntu and the Debian Day Volunteer Suicide. In the case of Bristot, he has died soon after the IBM Red Hat merger.
The reports that appeared in each case told us it was a probable heart attack.
When tragedy strikes like this, there is a tendency for each new obituary to deviate slightly from the last. It is important to work out which one was published first and look closely at the words that were chosen.
On 24 June 2024, a post appeared on Facebook from Alex Bristot, the brother of Daniel, in Brazil:
Meu irmão Daniel Bristot de Oliveira 37 anos, @bristot.me nos deixou no dia de hoje e partiu para junto ao nosso pai. Foi vítima de um infarto fulminante. Estava morando na Itália e estamos em tratativas para trazê-lo ao Brasil. Pedimos oração para sua alma. Cumpriu a sua missão neste plano e partiu para outro
Translated from Portuguese to English:
My brother Daniel Bristot de Oliveira 37 years old, @bristot.me left us today and went to our father. He was the victim of a massive heart attack. He was living in Italy and we are in negotiations to bring him to Brazil. We ask for prayer for his soul. He fulfilled his mission on this plane and left for another.
As far as I can tell, the LinkedIn post from Daniel Casini may be the first public news in the professional community.
Daniel Bristot de Oliveira suddenly passed away at the age of 37, probably due to a heart attack.
There is also a public announcement on the ReTIS web site. They chose not to speculate about the reason for the death.
Dr. Daniel Bristot De Oliveira, a professional affiliate at the RETIS lab of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna and Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, passed away all too soon at age 37.
In the case of Adrian von Bidder, the email that came out on debian-private told us:
I have the sad task to communicate to you the news of the death of Adrian von Bidder (avbidder, cmot), who passed away last Sunday, most probably of a heart attack.
After seeing these two reports about heart attacks, both involving a sudden heart attack, I went looking for more details about the phenomena. There was a study on young athletes in Italy and they found there are approximately 2 out of 100,000 people who suffer a heart attack at an early age in the group they studied. Nonetheless, their sample was based on slightly younger participants, mean age 23 years.
There are a lot of studies suggesting that stress, which is sometimes self-imposed, heavy workloads and conflict can all contribute to above-average risk of heart attack.