Red Hat’s (NYSE:RHT) internal mailing list is buzzing with comments from around the world mourning the death of Red Hat employee Seth Vidal, who was killed in Durham Monday night in a hit and run crash.
Vidal was a longtime member of the company’s Fedora Project and Red Hat’s Fedora team. Red Hat said he was a lead developer of the yum project, the software package manager used by Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other Red Hat Package Manager-based distributions.
“He played a significant role in the Fedora infrastructure team, working tirelessly to keep the lights on and leading the efforts to make building and managing third-party package repositories easy for Fedora developers,” Red Hat said in a statement released today.
Police said that Vidal, 36, was biking north in the 1700 block of Hillandale road around 9 p.m. Monday when he was struck from behind by a car. He was pronounced dead at Duke University Hospital. Durham police have charged Maceo Christopher Kemp Jr, 27, of Manson in Warren County, in connection with the crash. Kemp turned himself in to police on Tuesday, WRAL.com reported. He was charged with felony hit-and-run driving while license revoked.
Meanwhile, the Red Hat community continues to mourn the loss of one of its own.
“Seth’s contributions span far and wide in the open source community, and his impact will live on through the millions of people around the world who touch open source each day,” the company said in its statement. “Thank you, Seth, for everything you contributed to open source, to Fedora, and to Red Hat. We will miss you, and you will never be forgotten.
Read Red Hat’s full statement here.
