Eric Laffoon

[Andras Mantia]

Dear fellow members,

 I hope it will not bother you to write a few words about a person, who passed 
away a few days ago. I only found out today, but as he was someone close to me 
at one point and also very much involved in the KDE project, I felt I need to 
write a few words about him.
  25 years ago I was still trying to find my way in the world and while I was 
learning Qt and discovered KDE, I was contacted by someone from the USA who 
reported bugs and asked for new features for a small  KDE application I wrote 
at that time. 
 And that's how it started. He dragged me into another project that he used, 
but lacked developers due to disagreement with the original authors. 
 Eric was very passionate about cats, programming, open source and although 
not really a coder, he was a supporter of the open source idea and especially 
of KDE, not only in words, but by putting his hard earned money in it. 
 For years he supported the development of the Quanta Plus application, came 
with ideas for it, participated in the community discussions, was present at 
several aKademy meetings, also as a speaker. At that point he was a well known 
person in the community.  As life takes you on unknown paths, our 
collaboration ended around 2009. I don't contribute much, if at all nowadays 
to the project. He also had big changes in his life over the years and left 
the KDE community too. We only occasionally exchanged mails in the past years, 
I didn't really follow what is going on with him, and I was stunned to hear 
about him passing away.
 Eric, without you I would not be here and I would not be the person who I am 
now. You gave me the opportunity to be a full time open source developer for 
years, this gave me the opportunity to meet an extraordinary community with 
very skilled and nice developers, many of them still being my friend and my 
workmates here at KDAB. Without your support I probably wouldn't work there, I 
wouldn't and couldn't live my life as I do now. You were a supporter, a 
mentor, a friend even if we had disagreements. I will never forget you.

 Wherever you are I hope you will find some cats and have fun with them!

May you rest in peace, 

András

PS: I attach some pictures with him from different KDE gatherings and some 
links...

https://dot.kde.org/2003/04/22/people-behind-quanta-plus/
https://dot.kde.org/authors/elaffoon/
https://www.golem.de/0408/33049.html
https://www.facebook.com/groups/284483488422443/permalink/2987121768158588/

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