Eric Raymond, John Carmack Mourn Death of 'Bufferbloat' Fighter Dave Taht

Wikipedia remembers Dave Täht as 'an American network engineer, musician, lecturer, asteroid exploration advocate, and Internet activist. He was the chief executive officer of TekLibre.'

But on X.com Eric S. Raymond called him 'one of the unsung heroes of the Internet, and a close friend of mine who I will miss very badly.'

Dave, known on X as @mtaht because his birth name was Michael, was a true hacker of the old school who touched the lives of everybody using X. His work on mitigating bufferbloat improved practical TCP/IP performance tremendously, especially around video streaming and other applications requiring low latency. Without him, Netflix and similar services might still be plagued by glitches and stutters.

Also on X, legendary game developer John Carmack remembered that Täht 'did a great service for online gamers with his long campaign against bufferbloat in routers and access points. There is a very good chance your packets flow through some code he wrote.' (Carmack also says he and Täht 'corresponded for years'.)

Long-time Slashdot reader TheBracket remembers him as 'the driving force behind '>the Bufferbloat project and a contributor to FQ-CoDel, and CAKE in the Linux kernel.'

Dave spent years doing battle with Internet latency and bufferbloat, contributing to countless projects. In recent years, he's been working with Robert, Frank and myself at LibreQoS to provide CAKE at the ISP level, helping Starlink with their latency and bufferbloat, and assisting the OpenWrt project.

Eric Raymond remembered first meeting Täht in 2001 'near the peak of my Mr. Famous Guy years. Once, sometimes twice a year he'd come visit, carrying his guitar, and crash out in my basement for a week or so hacking on stuff. A lot of the central work on bufferbloat got done while I was figuratively looking over his shoulder...'

Raymond said Täht 'lived for the work he did' and 'bore deteriorating health stoically. While I know him he went blind in one eye and was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.'

He barely let it slow him down. Despite constantly griping in later years about being burned out on programming, he kept not only doing excellent work but bringing good work out of others, assembling teams of amazing collaborators to tackle problems lesser men would have considered intractable... Dave should have been famous, and he should have been rich. If he had a cent for every dollar of value he generated in the world he probably could have bought the entire country of Nicaragua and had enough left over to finance a space program. He joked about wanting to do the latter, and I don't think he was actually joking...

In the invisible college of people who made the Internet run, he was among the best of us. He said I inspired him, but I often thought he was a better and more selfless man than me. Ave atque vale, Dave.

Weeks before his death Täht was still active on X.com, retweeting LWN's article about 'The AI scraperbot scourge', an announcement from Texas Instruments, and even a Slashdot headline.

Täht was also Slashdot reader #603,670, submitting stories about network latency, leaving comments about AI, and making announcements about the Bufferbloat project.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.