Ian Murdoch, the founder of Debian

On Monday, December 28, Ian Murdock passed away. This is a person whose contribution to the Open Source community and the development of the entire IT industry is difficult to overestimate. If you are using Linux, then your distribution is most likely based on Debian. The second half of the name is Ian, releasing the first release of the distribution in 1993. (The first half is Debra, his girlfriend and then his wife.) Or maybe you had a chance to work with OpenSolaris ? This is also largely his merit. He was only 42.

Since November of this year, Ian worked at Docker . I allow myself to translate the obituary issued by the company.

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Dear friends and members of the open source community.

With great regret we inform you that Ian Murdoch died on Monday night. This is a tragic loss for his family, for the Docker community and for the entire open source world - we all mourn his demise. We express our deepest sympathy and full support to the family of Ian, his children and loved ones.
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Perhaps most of all, Ian was known professionally as the founder of the Debian project he created when he was still a student at Purdue University , where he received a bachelor's degree in computer science in 1996. Debian was one of the first Linux distributions released; and now it is considered one of the most successful open source projects in general. Ian helped shape the concept of a truly open project and community, including both open architecture and open input to the project. The founding document of the entire open source movement, Open Source Definition , was initially the official statement of the Debian project. This is evidence of Ian’s commitment to openness and to the community, which today has more than a thousand people involved in Debian development.

In the past decade, Ian continued to contribute to the technology community as the technical director of the Linux Foundation; as a major leader at Sun Microsystems, including as the chief architect of the Indiana project (which resulted in the release of OpenSolaris in its current form - approx. transl.) ; and finally as vice president of platforms at ExactTarget in Indianapolis, who became part of Salesforce in 2012.

We consider it a great success that we happened to know Ian and work with him. He impressed everyone he worked with with depth of thought, passion and experience. He was a truly outstanding person and served as inspiration for many of us. His death is a loss to all who knew him and came into contact with him.

If you want to share your thoughts or condolences, the Ian family and we, the Docker family, will be grateful if you write them in the comments on this page. Separately, the Ian family asks the press and all beneficiaries to respect their privacy and send all requests through the Docker.

The Debian community also honored Ian’s memory here .

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Given the size of Ian’s figure and despite his family’s request for respect for private life, I believe the community has the right to know about the circumstances of his death. And they turned out to be quite strange. The fact is that on the day of his death, Ian wrote a series of tweets that were completely uncharacteristic for him, neither in style nor in content. Twitter has already closed its tape, but it is still available in the Google cache , and someone managed to copy it to Pastebin . There Ian writes:

• the intention to commit suicide;
• about beatings by the police, after which he was taken to hospital;
• about the police lawlessness in general (this topic is still widely discussed after the events in Ferguson);
• promises to write a detailed blog post (which was never written);
• swears at @jackstormwriter and writes that he wants him dead.

He had never written anything like this before. The last entry in his blog dates from the 8th of September this year. In discussions on the Internet, there are a variety of assumptions - from hacking Twitter account to mental illness, which led Ian to suicide. There is no information from his family yet. Probably, his death will be investigated and we will learn new details.

UPD.
The Register reported information received from the San Francisco police. According to their version, on December 26, the police received a message that a person was breaking into someone's home. The police arrived at 11:30 pm and identified this person as Ian Murdoch. He resisted, there was a fight. As a result, Murdoch issued a penalty for the attack and for obstructing the actions of the police. Also, according to the police, he was drunk. A doctor was called in to treat the abrasions on Murdoch's forehead, and Murdoch was released to the hospital.

A few hours later, at 2:40 am, the police were again called in the same quarter, according to the message that Murdoch was banging on the neighbor's door again. And again I had to call a doctor and give him medical assistance. This time the police took Ian and put him in a cell in the county jail. In the afternoon, he was released on bail of $ 25,000. That was on Sunday, December 27th. He died the next day.

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In any case, the death of Ian is indeed a serious loss to all. Hopefully, the Debian community will be able to live through it and maintain the level of the project and releases worthy of its founder.