The Debian Project mourns the loss of Ray Dassen

May 23rd, 2013

The Debian Project has lost a member of its community. Ray Dassen (jdassen) died on May 18th.

Ray was a Debian Developer for an incredible 19 years. He joined the project in 1994, and continued to be an active contributor until recently.

Ray was one of the founding members of the Debian GNOME team, his friendliness and willingness to help fostered a spirit of collaboration within the GNOME team. He continued his involvement within Debian as the maintainer of several packages, most notably the Gnumeric spreadsheet.

The Debian Project honours Ray's great work and his strong dedication to Debian and Free Software. His technical knowledge and his ability to share that knowledge with others will be missed. His contributions will not be forgotten, and the high standards of his work will continue to serve as an inspiration to others.

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The Debian Project is an association of Free Software developers who volunteer their time and effort in order to produce the completely free operating systems Debian.

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For further information, please visit the Debian web pages at https://www.debian.org/ or send mail to <press@debian.org>.