Didn't know about that side of his talent. Among broader Russian audience Stiver was known as a maintainer of the largest pirate library in Russian (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41634780).
Didn't realize that! His death sent shocks across the Russian speaking internet because he was the maintainer of Flibusta but noone spoke about his other passion.
Back in the day, I had to deal with some poorly documented closed source Java applications (e.g. IBM WebSphere). Tools like Fernflower and its precursors were invaluable to fill the gaps.
I worked on WebSphere back in the day. There were a lot of pre-compiled libraries provided by other IBM teams. I too made good use of decompilers (probably jad at the time) as it was often easier than trying to track down the source.
I also had a huge library of decompiled Websphere libraries. IBM was always sending patches and we would go "ok, what does this do?" "Fixes your problem?""How""Really well." So it got decompiled to see what it did.
There were lots of "We think your patch is doing XYZZY, we see where our code should be doing that. We've updated our code and the problem went away."
Fernflower was awesome. RIP Stiver, glioblastoma can be an ugly way to die.
I don't think it will see any, people moved from Russia not because a single person in power, but because of systemic problems on all levels - kindergartens, schools, police and safety, rights to do a legit business. It's never a head person, it's always a system that been enabled and groomed by a head person or party
Most likely Stiver emigrated in the 90s for economic reasons -- Russia was in shambles. There are about 11 millions of emigrants of Russian origin [0], but I highly doubt that many will come back even if tomorrow we get a new liberal president.
How do you change the political environment in a dictatorship where ruling class has all the power and majority of the money and controls what you should read, watch or talk about?
So let's see, Russia's population is 1/2 that of the US and it's irrelevant. But the US population is 1/5 of China's. When do you expect to see irrelevance of the United States as a world power?
Didn't know about that side of his talent. Among broader Russian audience Stiver was known as a maintainer of the largest pirate library in Russian (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41634780).
It is also broader than just Russian and bigger than just pirate. Flibusta has been my go-to source for books for many years.
Didn't realize that! His death sent shocks across the Russian speaking internet because he was the maintainer of Flibusta but noone spoke about his other passion.
Back in the day, I had to deal with some poorly documented closed source Java applications (e.g. IBM WebSphere). Tools like Fernflower and its precursors were invaluable to fill the gaps.
Thank you, Stiver, and R.I.P.
I worked on WebSphere back in the day. There were a lot of pre-compiled libraries provided by other IBM teams. I too made good use of decompilers (probably jad at the time) as it was often easier than trying to track down the source.
I also had a huge library of decompiled Websphere libraries. IBM was always sending patches and we would go "ok, what does this do?" "Fixes your problem?""How""Really well." So it got decompiled to see what it did.
There were lots of "We think your patch is doing XYZZY, we see where our code should be doing that. We've updated our code and the problem went away."
Fernflower was awesome. RIP Stiver, glioblastoma can be an ugly way to die.
> glioblastoma can be an ugly way to die.
He opted for an assisted suicide: https://flibusta.is/node/684900.
Really appreciated the time someone spent putting that together, good article.
R.I.P Stiver
> a German programmer of Russian origin
I wonder how much of a boom Russia will see from émigrés returning home if the political environment lets up a little
I don't think it will see any, people moved from Russia not because a single person in power, but because of systemic problems on all levels - kindergartens, schools, police and safety, rights to do a legit business. It's never a head person, it's always a system that been enabled and groomed by a head person or party
Most likely Stiver emigrated in the 90s for economic reasons -- Russia was in shambles. There are about 11 millions of emigrants of Russian origin [0], but I highly doubt that many will come back even if tomorrow we get a new liberal president.
[0] https://publications.iom.int/system/files/pdf/WMR-2022.pdf
How do you change the political environment in a dictatorship where ruling class has all the power and majority of the money and controls what you should read, watch or talk about?
Not much. Russia is a country of just 140M people. With wider availability of education/etc. size of population matters more and more.
And Russia's demographic crisis is going to get a lot worse, cementing its irrelevency as a world power: https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/03/04/russias-populati...
So let's see, Russia's population is 1/2 that of the US and it's irrelevant. But the US population is 1/5 of China's. When do you expect to see irrelevance of the United States as a world power?