Ian Murdock, promoter of free software, dies at 42

Ian Murdock, the founder of Debian, a member of the Linux Foundation and one of the top promoters of free software, died this week, according to the blog at the open software developers’ platform Docker. He was 42.

“With a heavy heart Debian mourns the passing of Ian Murdock, stalwart proponent of Free Open Source Software, Father, Son, and the ‘ian’ in Debian,” said the operating system community in a statement after his death.

The Germanborn Murdock founded the Debian project in 1993, releasing the first versions of the free operating system based on Unix later that same year. Debian would become one of the world’s top operating systems, running on computers around the planet, embedded devices and even on the space station.

Murdock’s focus was to create a distribution community that did the right thing ethically and technically, said Debian in its statement.

He was the technology chief of the Linux Foundation and in 2003 he became the vice president of Sun Microsystems until that firm was acquired by Oracle, later working on the development of cloudbased systems and eventually going to work for Salesforce.

Last month, Murdock left the firm to join Docker, an open platform for software design.

His death came after on Monday he began posting messages on Twitter about having a unspecified confrontation with police, something that Ars Technica has confirmed.

On Dec. 28, Murdock apparently posted a tweet saying he was going to kill himself, although the circumstances of his death have not been made public.