Mourning Steve French [LWN.net]

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Mourning Steve French

[Posted August 23, 2026 by corbet]

From Jeremy Allison we have the<br>sad news of the passing of Steve French. He was the maintainer of the<br>kernel's SMB filesystem code for many years, having only dropped that<br>role due to health issues in the last week. "I've known Steve for<br>over 20 years. He was a legend in the community, and a really good<br>friend. He will be greatly missed. Farewell Steve." He will indeed be missed.

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Steve will be missed

Posted Aug 23, 2026 15:04 UTC (Sun)<br>by jlayton (subscriber, #31672)<br>[Link]

Steve merged my first upstream patch into the Linux kernel. He and I worked closely together for several years on the Linux CIFS client, a project he tirelessly pursued and advocated. He was a good friend too, always willing to help someone. I'll always remember going to the evening events after LSF/MM, and there would be Steve, still plinking away on his laptop. Farewell, my friend!

Testimonial to Steve

Posted Aug 23, 2026 16:24 UTC (Sun)<br>by jra (subscriber, #55261)<br>[Link]

Is now live on samba.org. Including a joke. Steve would never have forgiven us for not having one last "where is Steve ?" joke 🤣

Steve had such a positive effect on the whole community.

Posted Aug 23, 2026 16:34 UTC (Sun)<br>by jra (subscriber, #55261)<br>[Link] (1 responses)

Back in the late 1990's, maybe early 2000's I was working at VA Linux. The Samba Team announced our first members who were IBM employees, Steve French and Jim McDonough.

Larry Augustin, the CEO of VA asked me somewhat nervously "Aren't you afraid of IBM taking over open source Samba ?". I laughed and told him, "If I'm right about Steve and Jim, open source is going to take over IBM".

I'm happy to say I was right about Steve and Jim 😄.

Steve had such a positive effect on the whole community.

Posted Aug 23, 2026 21:48 UTC (Sun)<br>by willy (subscriber, #9762)<br>[Link]

> "If I'm right about Steve and Jim, open source is going to take over IBM"

Years later, Steve joined Microsoft and open source took over Microsoft too. Good job, Steve!

RIP Steve

Posted Aug 23, 2026 17:32 UTC (Sun)<br>by pcacjr (subscriber, #171081)<br>[Link]

Thanks for all the hard work, conversations, hacking and fun we had

together. You'll be greatly missed. Farewell Steve.

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