RIP Andre Hedrick: The engineer who kept the PC open

Obit Andre Hedrick, a principal engineer and operating system architect at Cisco Systems and a Linux kernel contributor, has died. He leaves behind a wife, four young children and many friends.

Andre made a significant contribution to personal computing history in a way few people fully realise.

In 2000, Andre was working for SuSE in Oakland and was looking after the Linux ATA subsystem, the operating system's interface with industry-standard hard disks. He was also a member of the ANSI sub-committee, T13, which defined the standard for ATA disks.

The committee was presented with proposals to incorporate a sophisticated piracy-thwarting system called CPRM, or Content Protection for Recordable Media, devised at IBM's Almaden Lab. The proposal was tabled by Intel and a group of three hard drive manufacturers: Toshiba, Matsushita (aka Panasonic) and IBM. The cryptographic system proposed was vastly more ambitious than the SDMI watermarking initiative for music, which by then had floundered.

More here - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/26/andre_hedrick/


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