Gervase Markham (programmer)


Gervase Markham was a British software engineer for the Mozilla Foundation, and was a lead developer of Bugzilla. He started contributing to the Mozilla project in 1999, and became the youngest paid employee of Mozilla.org at age 23 after he graduated from the University of Oxford.
Markham was named after his paternal grandfather Canon Gervase Markham, the squire and vicar of Morland near Penrith; both are related to the 16th-century poet and writer Gervase Markham. According to his Times obituary, the elder Gervase Markham was a descendant of William Markham, Archbishop of York.
In 2006, he won a Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award as "Best Community Activist". He has also presented to the FOSDEM conference for several years about the Mozilla Foundation activities and Bugzilla.
Markham was a born-again Christian, and had been undergoing treatment for metastatic adenoid cystic carcinoma. He wrote about both, and the relationship he saw between them. He also advocated Brexit.
He died on 27 July 2018 after a long battle with cancer.