The Passing Of An Open-Source GPU Driver Developer

A lot of exciting information was learned at FOSDEM from Wine on Android to Freedreno Gallium3D moving along to the open-source Tegra driver, but on a more grim note, a well known open-source graphics driver developer had passed away.

After being curious why the idTech4-forked Dante game engine and some other projects weren't advancing in recent months, I found out from multiple sources that Oliver McFadden has passed away. There hadn't been any Git activity from him in months, his Twitter and blog have been silent, etc, which sparked my inquiries.

Oliver McFadden had been an open-source contributor for years maintaining his idTech4 Dante game engine that delivered various interesting features to the open-sourced engine, ported Doom 3 to OpenGL ES 2.0, brought ioquake3 to the Nokia N900, was the developer behind the Revenge Radeon reverse-engineering utility, and made other commits to Mesa and the open-source Radeon driver stack in its early days.

Oliver McFadden, last September in Germany at XDC2012, showcasing his Dante game engine with EGL support.

McFadden was previously employed by Nokia and then most recently was working for Intel out of their Helsinki office. Oliver's passing happened in his native New Zealand, according to sources. Additional details on his passing have not been made public.

This saddening news comes less than one year after Intel had lost another open-source Linux graphics driver developer.