linuxawy: Let’s free the world

Beyond the cloud, the doomscroll, the meme, the binge watch, the pirated football stream, the eBook, the "whatever you want at the tip of your fingers right now," the government data registry for your car, national ID or tax returns, the threads of connectivity that link us to friends in need separated by choice or fate, beyond even these words that you are reading right now, there is an elsewhere that we rarely talk about, an elsewhere that makes all of it possible.

We all know it is there, not too unlike the atmospheric ring that sustains life on this planet: invisible but ever present.

The climate-technology metaphor has become commonplace these days, of course. But there is something to it. Every breath, like every key stroke, has a history. For most of us, we know this when things break, when the climate suddenly seems strangely warm for this time of year, or when a needed website gives us a 404 error.

There are those, however, who understand these micro-histories and how they have come down to us, here in the present, as a kind of inheritance. The ones who know usually speak an arcane language, fiddle with the infrastructure, and, if we are lucky, appear to explain to us what is happening when the world is falling apart.

One of those moments of appearance came in an odd place in 2012: a late night Egyptian talkshow.

The setting: Amr Khafagy's Telt El Talata show on ONTV. The topic: an Egyptian court had just ruled to block YouTube in the midst of a controversy surrounding a film critical of the Prophet Mohamed uploaded on the platform.

In his opening monologue, Khafagy outlines the conundrum at hand. "The Communications Ministry, which is currently responsible for implementing the ruling, says that the idea of blocking it is almost impossible. Google, the site's owner, stated that it does not intend to delete the video because, in its view, it does not fall under hate speech, meaning the blocking decision will continue until it is implemented," he tells his audience, the camera tight on his profile.

But the legal controversy has highlighted something important for us, Khafagy continues. "We will learn practically how a website can be closed or blocked on the internet, and more importantly, how internet users can circumvent this block. We will find all this out with my guest, a software and information systems expert." And then the camera pulls away from Khafagy and cuts to a stern face peering through a pair of frameless glasses: "Ahmed Mekkawy. Good evening, Ahmed."

Over the course of 40 minutes, Khafagy asks Mekkawy a series of questions:

“Who controls the internet? Google, Yahoo, and these companies, or governments and states, the ministries concerned with such matters, or can a person control the internet themself?”

“Why do governments get involved in this type of censorship? Is it for political reasons, such as opposing the regime? What is the reason? Generally speaking, what are the reasons usually present when governments step in to monitor or block sites?”

“Please let us know what “sibrani” (cyber) means.”

[The people who wrote the Declaration of the Indthe ependence of Cyberspace] say that in China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, they are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting checkpoints along the borders of Cyberspace. It may repel the contagion for a short time, but it will not succeed. What does that mean? What are “checkpoints”?

And with each question, Mekkawy explains to an audience tuned in to watch one of Egypt's flagship talkshows how this mystical thing called the internet works.

There are moments in history that are dress rehearsals for the future, and I would like to think this is one of them.

Because, while YouTube was not blocked in the end, the Egyptian government did eventually take a sizable step toward exerting control over the internet, blocking thousands of websites, proxies and VPNs to control what can be seen and who can speak.

When this future did come, Mekkawy would no longer be under the bright lights of a television set. He would be taking up a much quieter space, continuing to explain and build new possibilities for what was to come.

But last month, here, in another future, we lost Mekkawy in a tragic accident.

"Do you know the pain that comes from the future?" one of several people who knew Mekkawy whom I have spoken to in recent weeks asked me.

"To see, looking back/forward at once, what you’ve built be erased, to know someone you need won’t be there in the right future moment," I wrote back.

I know there are a thousand futures in which a political life like Mekkawy's will be necessary.

In order to exist in those futures, we need to all understand our past. And if Mekkawy is not with us in person, he can be with us in knowledge.

***

To see the moment in history I am writing about, you have to get in a time machine.

Yes, I know. Most histories are beyond our grasp, some mix of interpretation passed down over time compared over and against documents that help us balance what comes down to us. There is “no being there,” in that exact moment.

But the history I want to talk about poses a particular challenge, for most of the records are on the now disappeared pages of a mid-2000s blog called EGLUG. It is where our story begins.

You can still access the website thanks to the Wayback Machine — our internet time machine. Born in the mid 90s from a concern that web content would vanish whenever it gets changed or when a website is shut down, the Wayback Machine trawls the internet taking snapshots of websites that it then collates into a large database repository. There are over 387 snapshots of EGLUG between June 9, 2004 and August 29, 2023, when it stopped being scanned and was definitely offline.

You can flip through the archived pages until you hit a dead end (a webpage on the site that has not been photographed and is therefore lost to time).

But activity on the blog stops long before 2023. The last blog post on the archived homepage comes on Saturday 29/12/2012 at 12:50am submitted by BooDy: "Protesters gather in front of the Cabinet to demand an end to the $44 million spent on proprietary Microsoft software."

It is a fitting last post, if I ever saw one, for much of EGLUG's fundamental ethos was positioned against proprietary software in the hands of large companies like Microsoft. In 2012, as the protest against the tech giant played out, the company posted a profit mark of US$18.06 billion.

But what was EGLUG?

By looking through the archived pages that still exist, we can read a smattering of matters functional, operational and personal.

One of the earliest posts that we can see is EGLUG’s charter posted on Saturday 29/05/2004 at 12:40pm by YoussefAssad. It is there that we get a definition of what this strange site is — “eglug.org is the Egyptian Linux Users' community.”

But this seems to bring us more questions. For while we know what EGLUG stands for, the terms are multiplying. What is Linux and why does it matter?

To explain the concept, we need to take a brief detour into the world of computer software and the emergence of proprietary licenses.

In the late 1960s, a group of researchers affiliated with the American industrial research and development company Bell Labs began working on a new operating system, which would eventually be called Unix. At the time, software was distributed on tape. Today, when a software developer wants to update their code, they ask you to download it. But, at the time, there was no centralized update mechanism. This left companies and academics — the primary Unix users as running computers was very expensive at the time — to their own devices. If they faced a problem, they would modify the code themselves. As these small modifications accumulated over time, the divergences from the original Unix code became significant, so much so that you could say there were many Unixs.

With the breakup of the Bell System, Bell Labs became a subsidiary of AT&T Technologies in 1984 and the company began to try to rein in the plurality of Unix codes. The problem was that it was hard to dissemble what was AT&T’s proprietary rights under a 1976 copyright law and what fell outside of it given the haphazard nature of the code’s individual development. This set off what are known as the Unix wars: a legal and commercial battle to determine which Unix would rule the others.

Alongside the fight for money and influence, the Unix wars also set off the quest for a Unix alternative by those who were not interested in the right to sell the operating system but were instead participating in the pioneering spirit of bespoke computer development that those companies and academics had initiated.

Enter Linus Torvalds, a Finnish computer scientist. In his spare time, Linus developed what is known as the Linux kernel, the part of an operating system that communicates between the hardware and the various other functions of an operating system. The rest of what became commonly known as Linux was a combination of the Linux kernel and a suite of free and open-source software developed via the GNU Project, a free software, mass collaboration project announced in the early 1980s.

Linux did not have any Unix code, even if it was a spiritual successor, and it therefore avoided the legal issues of the Unix wars. Linux became popular in the 1990s and effectively made Unix technologies accessible to home users on personal computers where they had been confined to sophisticated workstations before.

In the early days of Linux, there were a series of “distributions,” effectively variations of the system components built on the original Linux kernel.

These distributions relied on “communities,” of which Linux User Groups or LUGs made up an important part in the early days. The relationship between the distribution and the LUG was mutually beneficial. The distribution would give early copies of the software to the LUG, which the members of the LUG would happily receive and then test for any issues. The LUG would then flag any of these issues in order to develop a patch that would help the distribution with their commercial sales.

LUGs were communities that were interested in an alternative.

Some came from a shared political vision: opposition to the gross capitalist ambitions of early Big Tech. But others came by accident. They might stumble upon an early computer trade magazine like Computer World with its CD inserts carrying a demo install of a Linux-distribution operating system like Turbolinux.

Nonetheless, if Linux and the principles behind it were going to reach the masses in the era of the personal computer, distribution would have to extend beyond tech experts.

In the early 2000s, LUGs were a counterforce to the world domination plan of Microsoft — I know the tone sounds farcical, but it really was a world domination plan. Representatives of Microsoft were courting Egyptian government officials in Cairo and showing up in education directorates across the country to ensure that Microsoft software — Windows OS and Office Suite — were used by bureaucrats and installed on all school computers. The thinking was that if you hook people at a young age, they will not know any other way to use computers: customers for life, in short.

Linux, therefore, needed boots on the ground, spreading the gospel of open-source alternatives to the black box that is the Microsoft Leviathan.

This is where EGLUG emerged and why the founding charter was important. If open-source software was a paradigm to think about the emerging ecosystem around software, it also necessitated a structure for the type of community one was trying to create to discuss this software.

And in that first post about the charter on the EGLUG blog, we can see the group trying to organize itself, testing the proposition, its supposed founding document. It was a sign that there would be hiccups amid many strong personalities.

The first comment on the charter is within an hour of the charter being posted. Alaa writes on 29/05/2004 at 1:24pm: “Few problems.”

In the post, Alaa takes issue with a series of procedural points regarding decision making, the overly stuffy and legal language of the charter and the question of hate speech. At the end, he makes a small quip that seems to come from an edit: “where does it say I'm supreme overlord?”

The thread twists and turns with responses titled things like “ABOUT THE LANGUAGE ” at 6:51 pm and “THIS IS A DISCUSSION” at 1:20 am the next day. “BAD WORDS IN BLOGS” makes an appearance by habdin on 01/06/2004 at 3:52pm. Then: “TESTING THE LIMITS” and “WHY NOT” and “DON’T EDIT THE CHARTER” and “MA3LESH.”

While Alaa makes a move to ban profanity for the sake of welcoming visitors as young as 13 years old, in a post titled “NOT TOTAL HIDE” made lower down, he offers an exception. “Hate speech towards SCO certified admins and Capitalist tools in managerial positions is of course allowed, even encouraged,” he writes.

Several months later, profanity was indeed banned in a vote. This followed several other political moves in the early days of EGLUG: there was a vote of no confidence in the admins of the site, a decision by management to disband. There was Alaa’s last post as admin. There was an election for a new board.

But amid the sometimes-fractious — one member of the group fondly called it an "aggressive" communication style — internal shaping of the community, the group was growing, passing 1000 members in June of 2005. The draw had a lot to do with the core functions of the LUG: outreach and teaching.

A post from early July lists the group’s activities:

Wednesday, 13/7/2005: A practical introduction to using the command line

Saturday, 16/7/2005: Weekly Open Meeting

Saturday, 16/7/2005: Introduction to Programming Using Python

Tuesday, 19/7/2005: Introduction to building and managing web pages and communities using Drupal

Saturday, 23/7/2005: Weekly Open Meeting

Saturday, 23/7/2005: Session on setting up an email server

Saturday, 30/7/2005: Weekly Open Meeting

Saturday, 30/7/2005: Session on Securing Web Applications

Then, there was a course at Cairo University, which had a significant turnout. Per a post by Marwa Youssef on Friday, 29/07/2005 at 5:27pm: “There were about 40 of the SSTE members and the university students to attend this course so we had to divide the course into 2 courses we were going to make the second course later but we had to make it the next week Sunday-Tuesday-Thursday as the supervisor Dr.prof Mahmoud Taher El-Hadedy meet us the last day and thanked EGLUG for this course and asked us to finish the course urgently within these 2 weeks so we didn't want to disappoint him.”

The group held outreach meetings with LUGs in Palestine and Sudan and conducted numerous “InstallFests" — events aimed at raising awareness around Free Open Source Software (FOSS), distributing Linux CDs for free and helping people install Linux on their machines.

But amid all the posts about activities and InstallFests, you can see in the archives a decisive moment in the historical record, one that would change the course of much of Egypt’s tech history.

It comes on Wed, 29/10/2008 at 9:02am in a post by DarKnesS_WolF. The post is titled “Promoting linuxawy to be website Administrator” and is a call for a vote. I will quote the post in full, given what I take to be its importance:

“Hello,

Alaa one of the founders of eglug has suggested that we should promote linuxawy to be a website admin,and I find this a good idea since we are already short in administrators and he is doing a great job. So let us collect the votes and the points”

What follows is a near unanimous move to approve the motion, with some quibbling over whether the site really needs more administrators, harkening back to some of the early days of bickering over administration.

Seven hours after the original post, linuxawy, whose avatar is the Linux logo penguin with the words "Linux Inside" written on its stomach, wades in:

"Thanks alot guys, this a great trust to have from the community. i didn't check the site for one day and i find this topic and all those replays, this makes me feel great 🙂

for those who doesn't know me well, I work as a sysadmin and I can call myself experienced regarding administrative tasks like webservers, networking, security, bash scripting, hosting companies, ... etc.

Though i know nothing about php, but i do maintain my own blog powered by drupal.

Ahmed D. El-Mekkawy"

The message has most of what you need to know about Mekkawy from a technical perspective, “etc.,” which is to say he could do most things, abilities that would be demonstrated over the next nearly 20 years, as he would go on to found his own company, Spirula, and play a leading role behind the scenes in keeping Egypt’s and the region’s critical online infrastructure online.

He comes in again a bit farther down in the responses as more votes come in to show off some of his humor. “Regarding the votes above i see that i'm close the imaginary 99% in elections :P,” he writes.

After the vote, Mekkawy’s presence on the pages of the blog becomes more pronounced. There is the Open Source Symposium at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, an introduction to free open source software (FOSS) at the Faculty of Engineering in Alexandria.

But his presence is more than just organizing events.

There is an invitation to his wedding posted on the blog.

Later, in the now hard to navigate photo library of EGLUG, you can find him standing at an InstallFest with his son.

And then there is the announcement in April 2010 of his next step, which would become his focus post-EGLUG: Spirula Systems.

“After years of working as a system engineer, I have decided to open my own company. It's called Spirula Systems. The name comes from the sea shell Spirula, as it looks like debian swirl, it's a shell, and it lives in alexandria, where Spirula Systems is located,” Mekkawy wrote.

In the official announcement, Mekkawy outlined what he thought his mission would be: “After years of dreaming and months of planning, Spirula is finally paving the path for businesses that are seeking to dip their feet in the waters of Free/Open Source Software. In a market that is dominated by software and infrastructures that are costly and occasionally inefficient, we are committed to spreading the values of FOSS, which desire to ensure that the best quality of IT infrastructure is available to everyone. FOSS has the dual advantage of being inexpensive to implement and of being in a continuous state of development, as such we believe that going the FOSS way is in the best interests of any growing business. And that's what we are here for: to give you the chance to explore the possibilities of what FOSS has to offer your company.”

The plan was thus to take the open-source ethos out of the blog pages and InstallFests and into the world.

The revolution only accelerated this movement.

Several initiatives sprung up and Mekkawy was involved in many of them. Through Spirula, he began to play an active role in helping websites stay online, a role he would continue to play over the next 14 years. A post from his private blog underlines the support Mekkawy played.

He also sat on the advisory board of Motoon, which was founded by Manal and Alaa. Motoon took much of the ethos of the impromptu services that EGLUG once provided in pop-up fashion and created something of a school.

Mekkawy was also not keen to work on the margins. The revolution provided an opportunity to take the FOSS project further.

After the revolution, people were trying to grasp at any opportunity to create change in the status quo.

And a key point of concern was the national tech landscape.

Since the early 2000s, the Egyptian government had run an e-government initiative to build a national information base and provide government services online. And Microsoft was a key implementation partner.

The program cost millions of dollars and there were no safeguards for data.

In December 2012, the official Facebook page of Prime Minister Hesham Qandil announced that one of the Cabinet's main achievements is that it sealed a deal worth $43 million with Microsoft to buy and maintain licensed software for the government.

The announcement set off protests in front of the Cabinet, calling for the government to scrap the deal and turn to open source software.

Activists and programmers held signs reading "Stop capital flight now" and "Why should we spend money over something that can be free?"

"What the government is buying is the license to use software and not new [software]," Ali Shaath, co-founder of the Egyptian Association for Free and Open Software and the Arab Digital Expression Foundation, told Egypt Independent at the time.

Mekkawy worked alongside Shaath and others in the Open Egypt initiative, which was an attempt to steer the government away from onerous contracts and toward free and open source software.

They held intensive meetings with the Communications Ministry, the now-dissolved Administrative Development Ministry, NGOs, academics and the private sector and drafted a national strategy.

The National Open Source Strategy that Mekkawy and others worked on was ambitious, even if it wasn't up to their full aspirations.

The goals, according to internal documents, included:

• Building a software and services industry based on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)
• The industry must be capable of competing regionally and internationally
• Active participation of this industry in the production of free and open source software
• Creating large numbers of programmers and system administrators capable of dealing with free and open source technologies
• Increasing community participation in knowledge production in the field of free and open source software

As one person close to the project said: "The boundaries between the government as a 'them' entity and us had kind of disappeared a little bit and so we all took on initiatives that would be somehow with the government, whether it was infrastructure or anything involved with the elections."

And Mekkawy was very involved in Egypt's post-revolution elections and referendums, ensuring that the old joke of a candidate needing a 99 percent stake to win would no longer be a joke.

This took the form of elections.eg, a website for referendums and elections. People would query using their ID numbers and they’d get their polling station anywhere in the country.

Not a single request would get a “website is down, check back again tomorrow.”

Unfortunately, the 2013 coup undid much of the momentum that was building out of the EGLUG community, just as it began to decimate organizing efforts across the country.

But within two weeks of the coup, as the country moved toward the violence of Rabea and the tearing apart of the fledgling community the revolution had fostered, we find Mekkawy in a quieter, more personal mode. In a post defending Alaa from an online attack, Mekkawy writes about friendship and family.

“One of the things that amazed me about Alaa from the moment I knew him is that he was married before he graduated,” he writes. “He and Manal are inseparable — may God keep them together. Often, before we got married, I used to ask myself if I would be able to maintain the love between me and my wife like Alaa and Manal. He was married before I knew him for a while. One of the things that encouraged Alaa and Manal to have children after Mubarak stepped down was that they saw that I was able to have a son and at the same time not isolate myself from the world and be active in many areas.”

The coup changed everything, and Mekkawy was not content to recede into an apolitical shell. Yes, friends were being arrested, forced to flee the country. Repression was mounting. New sophisticated spyware was brought into the country. But the years of patching software and finding fixes where none were documented was now to be put to use in keeping whatever was still there for his friends and politically-adjacent comrades afloat.

Mekkawy moved to the shadows, but he was always there for everyone who needed him, as many people can attest.

Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza opened a new moment for Mekkawy. It was clear that the intersection between big tech and capital wasn’t just a concern about money and power in the abstract. No, technology was killing people, silencing voices at a level we haven’t seen before.

Two moments proved pivotal for the tech community in these years: the shock and awe of Israel’s pager attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon and the rapid targeting of Iranian political figures in the 12-day war between Israel and Iran over the summer.

Mekkawy was there to help. He began implementing ideas, taking websites over to open-source software to ensure they were firmly beyond Israel and America’s reach and finding unconventional hosting solutions for Palestinian websites that were facing unprecedented attacks from the US-controlled IP system.

And then, a few weeks ago, Mekkawy left us in the middle of the storm of the regional upheaval.

Gone.

It is strange to type the word.

Mekkawy was many things: a community organizer, a tech genius, a government consultant, an entrepreneur, a builder, a learner.

But above all, I find myself coming back to what one of his friends told me in recent weeks when I asked what allowed Mekkawy to continue despite everything?

Mekkawy wasn't just someone who worked on a Linux system, despite what his nickname linuxawy would have you believe. Mekkawy didn't just exist in this "nerd space." If you are only talking about Linux, or hosting or services, you miss the mark as to who he was or why his thinking was the way it was.

There were two connection points for all the things Mekkawy was. First, his foundational principles: it has to be open source, you have to have the freedom to use it, and you have to understand exactly how you can communicate the value of whatever solution you are proposing to the actual reality, to what is happening.

And the other point was "always learning." Mekkawy was always learning with the principles he had rather than learning a software or a particular infrastructure.

If you don't have freedom in the first place, this is why you are learning, to acquire freedom, his friend said. If you learn how to use Oracle technologies, you are being captivated by the learning that you already have.

As I was scrolling through the EGLUG archive pages, I chanced upon a signature line from one of the users. "Let's free the world," it read.

Freedom feels like a big word to use in current times. It feels like freedom is the farthest thing from what we have.

But I would like to think Mekkawy had a radical idea of what the term "free" in "free and open source software" meant.

It was a definition that allowed him to always think the radically possible. And where many of us can only dream about the contours of freedom, Mekkawy gave us the tools to build it.

I turn back to Khafagy's closing comments on that night so long ago, in 2012, a night preserved on YouTube, but also now saved on my hard drive, here, in the future, as I know how fickle the historical archive online can be.

"Ahmed Mekkawy, software expert, I thank you very much," Khafagy said. "Ahmed Mekkawy told us that the government monitors, blocks and spies, and you, dear citizen, can escape all of that, break through, and circumvent it."

Yes, we can. Thanks to you, Mekkawy.

***

In recent weeks, I have asked some of the people who knew Mekkawy to speak to his importance to them and more broadly to our political community as a testament and record for history. Below are their thoughts.

Raya Sharbain

On Monday, September 22, a friend shared the news in a group chat:

"Alaa Abdel Fattah received a presidential pardon."

The next morning, Mekkawy replied:

"I'm with him now, he's doing well, thank God."

A few hours later, he wrote:

"God bless you all. He was in a really good mood and it was a beautiful night. God willing, I’ll see him again today."

(...)

"It’s finally a joyful day for this family."

These were the last words I read from him.

Upon hearing the news, I called a mutual friend. She told me that, in moments like this, she turns to her belief in the divine order of events; that faith helps her tolerate this reality, to accept its cruel tone. She said, perhaps he needed to see Alaa one last time before he bid farewell.

Once, a couple of years back, I, like everyone else, messaged Mekkawy for help. I needed someone I could trust to meet a contact in Cairo and run security checks in person. Since I couldn’t be there myself, I reached out to you. You told me you’d be in Cairo that week anyway and would text me once you met them. I felt guilty asking, but you seemed almost joyful... you even thanked me for introducing you to them.

It’s rare for someone to do you a great favor and somehow be grateful to you for it.

I keep replaying our heart-to-heart in Taiwan. It was the end of a conference day, I was standing at the entrance of the building when you appeared. You probably asked how I was, and I found myself opening up, telling you how absurd everything felt; the nature of our work, especially after Gaza. You answered with utter sincerity and candor. You spoke about how you had begun to pivot your work, and then, almost in passing, hinted at your private life. I could sense pain in your words, but chose, then, not to probe further.

It's just too early.

***

Lina Attalah

It is paradoxical: the sudden disappearance of someone who existed silently, yet fully. In a genocidal moment where life has become disposable, I have been wondering all day: what does it mean to wake up to a world where Mekkawi is no longer around. It feels like a soul theft, huge, by the sea, similar to his life, but also quick, subtle and almost invisible, also like his life.

There was always something special about groups that engaged with contention through a vocational entry point, as opposed to the generic partaking in protests and revolutionary moments. Alaa and Manal introduced me to this world of techies in the early 2000s. They were all about open technologies, open the source code, everyone is invited to come in and play with the code. The outcome will always be different, surprising, outside the carcerality of prediction we have been trapped in, politically. It was both cryptic and generative. A past future.

There was community around this situation, a cult, almost, identity and identification. To be part of it, you needed to seem special, a tad antisocial, a tad superior with your tech skills. The women often broke the cycle; they were writing code with their feet on the ground. Mekkawi too.

What made Mekkawi stand out in this group for me is how the politics were not trapped in the vocation, how he rescued himself from the cult, how he went to places and people with what he has, how he performed support in instructive ways: full presentness and candid humility. In a moment where tech is *the* driving motor of capitalism, or maybe just a driving force, it became meaningless to be part of a cult of the past, and the way out is not to sell out. Instead, Mekkawi kept working with what he has, attuning it to the moment, while extending it to those in need. In a moment of political fragility, he silently turned to building digital infrastructure; robust yet agile, digital homes. Institutions and infrastructure in a moment of political danger is what Mekkawi is leaving me to think with.

“Was it you who changed your password” is all I recall from his messages. He was silently guarding my digital presence, like so many others. No more traces of messaging with Mekkawi, because he set everything to disappear. How to generate from a place of disappearance?

***

Mohamed Tita

Writing these words might be one of the hardest things I’ve forced myself to do in years. That’s why I decided to write in the simplest way possible. No embellishments, just the way I think. Mekkawy would like that. Maybe that’s why we became friends so quickly — a fellow geek who is a lot like me and speaks my language, which was very rare, especially in my social circle at the time.

“Very nice. But why did you use Nginx and not Apache?”

I was still very young. I wasn’t even sure yet that I was on the right career path, or that I knew how to do anything useful. As usual, I was tinkering with something no one asked for and no one would use in the end.

The second time I met Mekkawy was for work. I asked him to take a look at what I was trying to do and tell me what he thought.

Since then, I haven’t used Apache again. Nginx forever, chief!

“What! You’re here? Welcome!”

A few years later, work brought us together again. I was still young, but I’d learned a little more. He met me with the same smile and asked what I’d been up to with genuine interest. We chatted about the terrible state of the internet, and how Android had become impossible to use without Google services. I showed him the ROM I installed on my phone. He took his laptop out and showed me some new stuff he was trying out and we chatted about them. We could’ve gone on for an hour about a topic like that without getting bored.

“Okay, I’ll call Mekkawy and arrange with him.”

There are people whose absence is truly felt, leaving behind a terrifying void. But this is a loss that will be felt more deeply as time goes on. Mekkawy is the person I talk to to tell him about my ideas, scattered and jumbled, so he can help me get something useful out of them. He always did that with love and without any conceit. I don’t know how he managed to do it every single time!

“This thing you sent me turned out to be good. I will set it up for myself.”

A very important measure of my respect for someone is the consistency of their actions in their professional and personal lives with the ideas they claim to believe in. Mekkawy believed that he was always learning and therefore is responsible for putting what he learned to use in service of the world he wishes to see, and to pass it on to others who can benefit from it.

This is the biggest lesson he taught me — a lesson I will hold on to for the rest of my life. Knowledge is a cumulative product. It must be available to all so that we can all learn and teach each other and share our new ideas. I will always be proud that I’ve learned from him and worked with him.

As for the personal loss of my true friend, I don’t think my shocked mind will be able to put out words to express it. I hope he knows how much I love and respect him, how proud and grateful I am for him, and how heartbroken by the magnitude of this loss.

***

Reem al-Masry (Written on Protondocs)

Mekkawy,

I feel I need to go back to all the messages and emails that brought us together, to listen closely to all the voice notes you sent me over the last ten years, answering my repeated and urgent requests and questions about digital security and the protection of media and human rights organizations. I feel that in all these files and exchanges, I will discover a scattered guidebook on how to break free from the power of big corporations and regain your technological integrity.

Mekkawy didn’t need to convince us, as journalists or digital security consultants, about how big tech companies, with their profit models, have destroyed the public space on the internet, turning us into commodities that feed their capitalist surveillance-based profit system, or how they conspired with authorities. We were aware of this, but we hesitated to push our institutions to take steps beyond securing passwords and using VPNs, toward solutions that address the root cause of the problem: the centralization of infrastructure. We were hesitant because we didn’t want the burden of technical learning, we didn’t want to leave behind the comfort provided by Google, Apple and Microsoft. You would reassure us that everything is possible, that you would hold our hands and walk us step by step like toddlers, to move from the paternalistic iOS and Microsoft operation systems to ones that respect our right to experiment, develop and own the data, such as Ubuntu and F-droid.

Sometimes I’d tell you: “Mekkawy, it’s hard to be that idealistic” when you tried to get us to think about becoming independent from the services of the big tech companies. Then came October 7, which proved that there is nothing idealistic about seriously considering finding alternatives to Google, Microsoft and Amazon, which were an integral part of a global system of genocide supported by Arab and Western governments. The role of the big tech companies in enabling the genocide and providing it with its technical infrastructure was no different from the role of arms companies in providing missiles, drones and cluster bombs. How prescient you were.

Your solutions, though technical, were a calm political stance. I first got in touch with you in 2019 as the director of Spirula for cloud computing to chat about how independent media organizations could secure their websites — their most valuable asset — from cyberattacks, knowing that their financial resources are limited, each separately relying on big hosting companies that charge little but don’t provide adequate support for their websites.

The solution you proposed saw sharing technical and human resources as the only way for institutions to become independent from big hosting companies. You joined in designing a hosting infrastructure shared among several media institutions and oversaw securing it from the cyberattacks it faced from time to time.

Amid all that, and in every step, it was your light and cheerful spirit and your love of experimenting that pushed us to try new places, like Jordan. You and Dina came to give a workshop. How happy — and yet how sad — I was that you could see the occupied Golan and Lake Tiberias from Umm Qais in northern Jordan.

You were the first I reached out to to help organizations that were facing technical restrictions from hosting companies in the United States because of their work in exposing the crimes of the Occupation. You were very excited about the project, and when I shared the file with you with all the details, you told me off: “Gooogle docs?????? 😅." I felt ashamed and created the same file on Proton docs. It was then that you started sending me ideas for alternatives to share with the organizations to secure their infrastructure, to take their hand and walk them step by step. Since this project, we’d started cooking up, you and I, a bigger project. You made me believe that the imagined is possible, that we can take institutions on a journey to digital independence. And I waited, Mekkawy, and today we have to finish cooking our project without you, yet still with you.

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Nourhan Tharwat

My acquaintance with Mekkawy began through Mushtarak and the events held there to bring together everyone interested in technology, free knowledge and its role in social change. Later, in 2018, I worked at Motoon, where Ahmed was one of the members of its advisory board. During my work, most of the calls that took place between us were related to something broken, and Ahmed would unintentionally teach me how to ask and what information I might need to analyze technical problems.

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Mostafa Hussein

I am really saddened by the news of Ahmed Mekkawy's passing. I am still trying to absorb the shock. This is not just a great loss to his family and friends, but to the Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) community as a whole. He made significant contributions to the local Linux User Group and other grassroots initiatives aimed at promoting the adoption of FOSS. He was always there to help his friends solve their problems and was always a phone call away. He got things done and established a company that believed in the movement's core principles of empowering the users and promoting collaboration and sharing. This is very important at a time when the internet has become controlled by five US companies that constantly invade our privacy, sell our data and limit our online freedoms.

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Evronia Azer

I worked with Mekkawy in Alexandria. He was always people-centric and the last thing he'd think about was maximizing profits over people. He was all about minimum wages, dignity, equality in tech, work and life. He practiced what he preached, but more importantly he was a firm believer in people's power and capabilities. In all the years I've known him, 15 years, I can't remember him being angry or shouting at someone. He really knew how to get the best out of everyone. He cared about those who worked with him, was humble and always listened to you.

He would constantly work on initiatives and try something else if the first didn't work. Every time you'd speak to him, there was a stream of new ideas and projects to discuss. A very organized mind and technically brilliant. I always thought there was nothing he can't do.

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Enas Bassiony‏

I first met Ahmed seven years ago when I interviewed for a position as his assistant. At the time, I had just left a job with a toxic boss, and I knew nothing about cybersecurity or open-source technology. From the very first meeting, his patience and kindness stood out. For the first time, I understood what a healthy work environment truly meant, and how colleagues could feel like family.

Ahmed’s passion for his work was contagious. He taught me so much, not only about open source and technology, but also about life. Our conversations would drift into politics, investments, and, inevitably, coffee.

He helped me in more ways than I can count. With his encouragement, I traveled abroad for the first time, learned project management, and even developed better financial habits after he took the time to help me plan my savings.

To me, he wasn’t just a boss. He was a mentor, a friend, and, in many ways, like an older brother. His passing leaves a space that will be impossible to fill. And as a leader, he set the bar so high that I’ll probably spend the rest of my career measuring others against his example.

Farewell, Ahmed Mekkawy, and thank you for everything.