Steve French, longtime Linux SMB and CIFS maintainer, has died

Sources: LWN report, Phoronix report
Summary: LWN published "Mourning Steve French" on 2026-08-23, reporting the death in Jonathan Corbet's own voice and quoting Jeremy Allison. Phoronix had reported it earlier, attributing it to a social media post by a Samba developer. French maintained the in-kernel SMB client and CIFS code.
Why it matters: Maintainership of the in-kernel SMB client passed to Paulo Alcantara and Namjae Jeon as of Linux 7.3, so patches, regression reports, and stable backport requests for that code go to them.