Pieter Hintjens (3 December 1962 – 4 October 2016) was a Belgian

software developer Software development is the process of designing and Implementation, implementing a software solution to Computer user satisfaction, satisfy a User (computing), user. The process is more encompassing than Computer programming, programming, wri ...

, author, and past president of the

Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) is a non-profit organisation based in Munich, Germany, dedicated to establishing a free market in information technology, by the removal of barriers to competition. The FFII played a k ...

(FFII), an association that fights against

software patent A software patent is a patent on a piece of software, such as a computer program, library, user interface, or algorithm. The validity of these patents can be difficult to evaluate, as software is often at once a product of engineering, something ...

s. In 2007, he was nominated one of the "50 most influential people in IP" by '' Managing Intellectual Property'' magazine.

Biography

Hintjens was born in Congo in 1962 and grew up in

East Africa East Africa, also known as Eastern Africa or the East of Africa, is a region at the eastern edge of the Africa, African continent, distinguished by its unique geographical, historical, and cultural landscape. Defined in varying scopes, the regi ...

. Hintjens served as CEO and chief software designer for iMatix, a firm that produced

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

applications, such as the ZeroMQ high performance message

library A library is a collection of Book, books, and possibly other Document, materials and Media (communication), media, that is accessible for use by its members and members of allied institutions. Libraries provide physical (hard copies) or electron ...

, the OpenAMQ AMQP

messaging A message is a unit of communication that conveys information from a sender to a receiver. It can be transmitted through various forms, such as spoken or written words, signals, or electronic data, and can range from simple instructions to co ...

service, Libero, the GSL code generator, and the Xitami web server. He was active in

open standard An open standard is a standard that is openly accessible and usable by anyone. It is also a common prerequisite that open standards use an open license that provides for extensibility. Typically, anybody can participate in their development due to ...

s development, being the author of the original

Advanced Message Queuing Protocol The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) is an open standard application layer protocol for message-oriented middleware. The defining features of AMQP are message orientation, queuing, routing (including point-to-point and publish-and-subs ...

(AMQP), a founder of the Digital Standards Organization, and the editor of the RestMS web messaging protocol.RestMS.org
RestMS - a RESTful Messaging Service
RestMS is developed using a ''peer-to-peer, share-alike, branch and merge'' model (COSS) developed by Hintjens and others for the Digital Standards Organization in 2008. He was CEO of Inc., a wikifarm, until February 2010. In 2010, Hintjens was diagnosed with bile duct cancer, which was successfully surgically removed. However, in April 2016, it returned and he was diagnosed with terminal

cholangiocarcinoma Cholangiocarcinoma, also known as bile duct cancer, is a type of cancer that forms in the bile ducts. Symptoms of cholangiocarcinoma may include abdominal pain, yellowish skin, weight loss, generalized itching, and fever. Light colored stoo ...

. Hintjens underwent

voluntary euthanasia Voluntary euthanasia is the purposeful ending of another person's life at their request, in order to relieve them of suffering. Voluntary euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide (PAS) have been the focus of intense debate in the 21st century, ...

on 4 October 2016.

ZeroMQ

While in his position as iMatix CEO, Hintjens founded the ZeroMQ software project together with Martin Sustrik. ZeroMQ is a high-performance asynchronous messaging library aimed at use in scalable distributed or concurrent applications. In November 2013, Hintjens announced EdgeNet, a project building upon ZeroMQ for mesh networks. EdgeNet aims to build a secure,

anonymous Anonymous may refer to: * Anonymity, the state of an individual's identity, or personally identifiable information, being publicly unknown ** Anonymous work, a work of art or literature that has an unnamed or unknown creator or author * Anonym ...

peer-to-peer Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network, forming a peer-to-peer network of Node ...

alternative to the internet. Hintjens also authored several ZeroMQ projects, such as CZMQ, zproto, and Malamute.

Views

In October 2007, Hintjens warned that after

mortgage A mortgage loan or simply mortgage (), in civil law (legal system), civil law jurisdictions known also as a hypothec loan, is a loan used either by purchasers of real property to raise funds to buy real estate, or by existing property owners t ...

s and

consumer debt In economics, consumer debt is the amount owed by consumers (as opposed to amounts owed by businesses or governments). It includes debts incurred on purchase of goods that are consumable and/or do not appreciate. In macroeconomic terms, it ...

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...

s were a third

economic bubble An economy is an area of the Production (economics), production, Distribution (economics), distribution and trade, as well as Consumption (economics), consumption of Goods (economics), goods and Service (economics), services. In general, it is ...

waiting to damage the global economy, writing: "House prices fall and bad debt shakes the financial markets across the US and Europe. Bankers look nervously at their portfolios of consumer debt and mortgages. But some analysts say that it's patents, not houses or loans, that will tip the global financial market into crisis".Digital Majority
"Will the patent system trigger financial collapse in 2008?''
/ref>

Bibliography

* "Confessions of a Necromancer", 2016 * "Social Architecture", 2016 * "The Psychopath Code", 2015 * "ZeroMQ: Messaging for Many Applications", ''

O'Reilly Media O'Reilly Media, Inc. (formerly O'Reilly & Associates) is an American learning company established by Tim O'Reilly that provides technical and professional skills development courses via an online learning platform. O'Reilly also publishes b ...

'', 2013 * "Culture and Empire: Digital Revolution", 2013 * "Code Connected Volume 1", 2013 * "Scalable C", unfinished * "A protocol for dying", 2016

References

External links

Hintjens.com official website

Devil's Wiki
*
heironymouscoward.blogspot.com
* * *
Confessions of a Necromancer - Hintjens.com

"A Protocol for Dying" - Hintjens.com

"ZeroMQ founder Pieter Hintjens dies" - SD Times blog
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hintjens, Pieter 1962 births 2016 deaths Belgian activists Belgian computer programmers Belgian computer scientists Deaths by euthanasia Democratic Republic of the Congo emigrants to Belgium Free software people Patent law