In memoriam Prof. Dr. Philippe Bekaert (1967-2022)

[BlueStilton]

(https://www.uhasselt.be/en/instituten-en/expertise-centre-for-digital-media/in-memoriam)

_"It is with great sadness that we announce to you the passing of Professor Dr. Philippe Bekaert, full professor of computer sciences at Hasselt University. Philippe passed away at home, surrounded by his family, on the 31st of July 2022.

Professor Bekaert joined the Expertise centre for Digital Media on the 1st of August 2002, where he headed the Visual Computing research unit. In his career of exactly 20 years, he led the group to many successes, ranging from several important papers at leading computer graphics conferences such as Siggraph and CVPR, the deployment of his research within performance art and culture in collaboration with the company Crew, to the founding of several spin-offs that made his accomplishments available to the community.

He was a leading researcher who placed great importance on usable and deployable results. He was a pioneer in the field of high-resolution 360-degree video, immersive experience of virtual reality and fast processing of large amounts of visual material. Professor Bekaert has also left his mark on the computer science curriculum, including the development of the unique master profile in Visual Computing. Our students highly appreciated his interactive lectures and his topics for bachelor and master theses. By advising a large number of PhD students in this field, he ensured a lasting impact that crosses several generations.

Our thoughts are with his family, wife, Annelies, and three daughters, Lotte, Fien and Eva. We wish them strength in these difficult days. We are grateful for his dedication and contributions to the Expertise centre for Digital Media, and hope that the undeniable impact he had on our group of researchers and students can offer a little consolation."_

Shall we attempt to honour Dr. Bekaert by adopting this code?

I'll try contacting the faculty and see what they think.

[Schroedingers-Cat]

This really saddens me. I've had a couple of mail exchanges with Philippe Bekaert, and he was very friendly and helpful.

His snd-hdspe driver and the userspace configuration tool for the RME HDSPe MADI card significantly improved over the default module. The default driver would fail to autosync to an external clock source, which was fixed in Bekaert's driver. His hdspconf tool is also much more usable than the default driver's control mechanisms via alsamixer or similar.

Shall we attempt to honour Dr. Bekaert by adopting this code?

The improvements to the default driver would already be worth mainlining in my opinion. I have no experience with that, though, but @takaswie has made contributions to this repo and seems to be very experienced with mainlining ALSA modules.

[takaswie]

@Schroedingers-Cat I have no will at all to send patches to mainline of Linux kernel as tributes to someone. In development of Linux kernel, technical point of view is the most important and the most of participants respects the point regardless of paid worker,
expert, amateur, and hobbyist. If developer had less interests in technical discussion,
patches would never been applied even if they are posted.

[VennStone]

Shall we attempt to honour Dr. Bekaert by adopting this code?

I do hope someone is able to continue his excellent work.

[JustALawnGnome7]

@takaswie Given that the project is licensed under GTPL-3.0, would it be realistic for this project to be mainlined into the Linux kernel even if the original developer had wanted them to be?