According to the release notes of Fedora 16 (work in progress), this release of the popular Linux distribution is dedicated to Dennis Ritchie, who passed away recently. I think this is an excellent idea.
During the preparation of Fedora 16, the computing world lost one of its great contributors: Dennis Ritchie. Ritchie co-invented Unix and the C language. He also co-authored “The C Programming Language”, a book that taught many programmers just at the time personal computing was exploding. Without Ritchie computing would be nothing like it is today.
A humble man, not well-known outside his field, Dennis will always be remembered by those of us who practice the craft. Thank you Dennis.