Bonum Certa Men Certa

RIP Daniel Bristot de Oliveira, Red Hat death

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 28, 2024

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!

Daniel Bristot de Oliveira, Red Hat, Computer on the beach, Florianópolis, Brazil

 

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.

Posts relating to IBM Red Hat.

Other Recent Techrights' Posts

Speed of GNU/Linux
The media seldom speaks of the dangers of "proprietary software"
Proprietary Windows Versus "Linux" News (Trying to Keep People on Windows, Never Exploring GNU/Linux)
Good editors know better how to recognise threats and not give them lip service
Ensuring That Every Computer User Anywhere in the World Can Take Control of All His or Her Computers
We must fight the people who attack general-purpose computing, in particular those who push this agenda very aggressively inside Linux
Gemini Links 28/04/2025: Autism and Structural Navigation
Links for the day
What Happened to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) Elections: The Purge, the Cover-up, and the Witch-hunts
OSI has gone "full Microsoft"
 
Central African Republic (CAR): Vista 11 is Only ~0.2% Market Share
99.8% to go!
BSD and GNU/Linux Replaced Microsoft in Secure Servers, All Microsoft Has Left is LLM Slop for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD)
the FUD machine never rests
Gemini Links 28/04/2025: A Simple Task Tracking and Auto-Prioritization Tool and Other Programs
Links for the day
Links 28/04/2025: Canada's Election, Pakistan-India Conflict
Links for the day
Glue Inside Your Pizza (or Why People Will Get Fed Up With Slop)
People are given "answers" from non-intelligence word dumpsters
Links 28/04/2025: Cyberattacks Happening, Chatbots Disappointing, and "Free Speech Under Fire"
Links for the day
Phone Adoption Very Low in Vatican, Windows Usage Fell Nonetheless
Even in places where people still use desktops/laptops most of the time (and have access to these) Windows is gradually losing ground
GNU/Linux 9% in Cuba, Vista 11 Waning, Android Dominant
Microsoft has pretty much lost Cuba
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, April 27, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, April 27, 2025
In 24 Countries Observed by statCounter Vista 11 is Still Less Than a Quarter of Windows Users Despite All Other Versions Being 'Expired'
They ought to move to GNU/Linux
Links 27/04/2025: Pope Goodbyes, "Politics of Fear", Slop Redux and More Google Shutdowns (Google Debt Had Grown This Year)
Links for the day
Links 27/04/2025: Serenity Dialectics, Hockey Jersey Ethics, and More
Links for the day
Links 27/04/2025: Death of Nest Thermostats, Death of Metaverse
Links for the day
Links 27/04/2025: Projects Workflow and Discovering Technology
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, April 26, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, April 26, 2025
Microsoft Isn't on the Map in USSR
To them, it's either Google or Yandex
In Central America Windows Became a Small Force
These are countries where Windows used to have well over 95% of the "market"
What's Very Vexing to GAFAM, EPO and Others Is That It's Incredibly Hard to Censor Us (and Nobody Ever Successfully Did That Before)
resist, do not capitulate
Site May be Even Faster Now
It basically takes less than a tenth of a second to serve the page
Receiving SLAPPs and Collecting Them Like Trophies (the SLAPPs Always Fail)
People who file lawsuits bring even more attention to themselves (or to embarrassing statements about them)
Year of GNU/Linux on the Laptop?
It's not happening only in Lenovo
What People Must Understand About the Open Source Initiative (OSI)
some facts about the Open Source Initiative (OSI)
Many of the Scandals Are Interconnected (Overlapping People and Corporations)
We're only getting started
More Copyright Lawsuits Against LLM Slop Providers and Suppliers of LLM Slopfarms Would Benefit Society
It's not just bad for the Web and for society; it's also legally dangerous
Links 26/04/2025: General Assassinated in the Town of Balashikha, US Promoting Seafloor Mining
Links for the day
Links 26/04/2025: Facebook Layoffs Again, Remembering What's Real, and Say No to Mass Surveillance
Links for the day
Links 26/04/2025: NOAA Budget Cuts and "Dog Days Ahead"
Links for the day
In defence of JD Vance, death of Pope Francis
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Three Years in Prison for Disney Employee’s ‘Menu Hacking’: The Economic Fallout of Digital Menus
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, April 25, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, April 25, 2025