Chris Jewell's remarks for LNZ's memorial service 2003-03-29

It is said of Mozart that he would compose an entire symphony is his head, then sit down with pen and paper and write the whole thing out in one sitting. Leonard wrote complex computer programs the same way, though of course with a keyboard instead of a pen: he was a Mozart of computer software. I viewed his talent with awe and amazement.

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When I started working at Lucid in late 1990, I soon found than I needed a particular utility program, bsplit, which was available on the Sun3s and Sun4s that many of my coworkers were using, but had not been compiled for the antiquated Sun2s like the one on my desk. Someone advised me to send email to lnz, Leonard, who had probably consed up the program that I needed.

He wasn't likely in those days to give me the source code to compile on my workstation, but he was happy to build it for me and install the binary where I and Lucid's few other Sun2 users could run it. In those days, Leonard sometimes played his source code pretty close the the vest, though he was always generous with his time and effort to help people out, on the job or elsewhere.

A few years later, though, Leonard became a major contributor to Linux, donating the program source code that was the fruit of his mental labors to the world at large. He had always been generous with his help to others: now he extended his generosity to include his source code, and extended the reach of his generosity to include the millions of Linux users, as he made important contributions to the ability of Linux to scale from desktop PCs to multiprocessor servers with large disk arrays.

He was the epitome of the skilled contributor to the Open Source software movement, a movement whose essence is generosity.

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In the first years that I knew Leonard, I sometimes used to joke that when we did finally build an orbital colony at L5, Leonard would be a likely candidate to move there, since he wouldn't much mind never being able to go outdoors. He surprised me again, though. In the last year of his life, he took to the outdoors with great enjoyment, going from "hard-core kernel hacker" to "hard-core hiker."

I'll always wonder how else Leonard would have suprised me if he had stayed among us longer.

Would he have found even more ways to give the benefit of his talents to his friends and to the world at large? I'm sure he would have.

Would he have continued to find new things to try, to stretch the limits of his world? I'm sure he would have done that, too.

He was a remarkable man, and a dear friend. I miss him, but I take comfort in knowing that the world is a better place because of the way he chose to live his life and use his talents.