December 31, 2015 at 05:58

Ian Murdoch, founder of Debian, is gone

    In the Monday, December 28, died, Ian Murdock ( of Ian Murdock ). 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 use 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 happened 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 an obituary released by the company.


    Dear friends and members of the open source community.

    It is with great regret that we report that Ian Murdoch passed away on Monday night. This is a tragic loss for his family, for the Docker community and for the whole world of open source software - we all mourn his demise. Ian's family, his children and loved ones, we express our deepest sympathy and all kinds of support.

    Perhaps most of all, Ian was known professionally as the founder of the Debian project, which he created as a student at Purdue University.where he received his bachelor's degree in computer science in 1996. Debian was one of the first Linux distributions to be 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 contribution to the project. The founding document of the entire open source movement, “Defining Open Source,” was initially the official Debian project statement. This is a testament to Ian's commitment to openness and to the community that today has more than a thousand people involved in the development of Debian.

    Over the past decade, Ian has continued to contribute to the technology community as CTO of the Linux Foundation; as a senior manager 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, which became part of Salesforce in 2012.

    We consider it a great success that we happened to know Ian and work with him. He struck everyone with whom he worked with the depth of thought, passion and experience. He was a truly outstanding person and served as an inspiration to many of us. His death is a loss for everyone 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, would be grateful if you wrote them in the comments on this page. Separately, Ian's family asks the press and all well-wishers to respect their privacy and forward all requests through Docker.

    The Debian community has also honored Ian here .



    Given Ian’s figure size and despite his family’s request for respect for privacy, I believe the community has the right to know the circumstances of his death. And they turned out to be rather strange. The fact is that on the day of his death, Ian wrote a series of tweets that were completely uncharacteristic of him either in style or in content. Twitter has already closed his feed, but it is still available in the Google cache , and someone managed to copy it to Pastebin . There Ian writes:
    • intention to commit suicide;
    • about beating by the police, after which he was hospitalized;
    • about 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 with the user @jackstormwriter and writes that he wishes him dead.

    He had never written anything like this anywhere else. The last entry on his blog dates back to September 8th of this year. In discussions on the Internet, various assumptions are made - from hacking a Twitter account to a mental illness that led Ian to suicide. There is no information from his family yet. Probably, an investigation will be conducted into his death and we will find out new details.

    UPD.
    "The Register" reportedinformation obtained 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 house. Police arrived at 11:30 pm and identified this person as Ian Murdoch. He resisted, there was a fight. As a result, Murdoch was fined for assault and for obstructing police actions. 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 a.m., the police were again called in the same quarter according to reports that Murdoch was again banging on his neighbor's door. And again I had to call a doctor and provide him with medical care. This time, the police took Ian and put him in a cell in the county jail. During the day he was released on bail of $ 25,000. It was on Sunday, December 27. The next day he died.



    Be that as it may, Ian's death is truly a serious loss for everyone. Hopefully, the Debian community can survive it and keep the project and release level worthy of its founder.
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