It's with much sadness that we announce the passing of our friend and colleague Ralph Giles, or rillian as he was known on IRC.

Ralph began contributing to Xiph.org in 2000 and became a core Ghostscript developer in 2001[1]. Ralph made many contributions to the royalty-free media ecosystem, whether it was as a project lead on Theora, serving as release manager for multiple Xiph libraries or maintaining Xiph infrastructure that has been used across the industry by codec engineers and researchers[2]. He was also the first to ship Rust code in Firefox[3] during his time at Mozilla, which was a major milestone for both the language and Firefox itself.

Ralph was a great contributor, a kind colleague and will be greatly missed.

Official Announcement: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7427730451626262530

[1]: http://www.wizards-of-os.org/archiv/sprecher/g_h/ralph_giles.html

[2]: https://media.xiph.org/

[3]: https://medium.com/mozilla-tech/deploying-rust-in-a-large-codebase-7e50328074e8