Ian Murdock, founder of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution project, has died at the age of 42. His death, announced in a blog post by Docker CEO Ben Golub, came after an apparent encounter with police and a statement posted on Murdock's Twitter feed that he was going to commit suicide, though no cause of his death has been given.
Murdock, born in Germany in 1973, founded Debian in 1993 while studying computer science at Purdue University. The distribution gets its name from the combination of his name and that of his then-girlfriend Deborah Lynn. The pair married, and had two children; they divorced in 2007.
Murdock's Debian Manifesto railed at the poor software maintenance of other Linux distributions of the time—and that of Softlanding Linux System (SLS) in particular, bemoaning the lack of attention developers gave to distributions and what he saw as the big cash grabs being made by would-be commercial Linux developers. He outlined Debian's modular architecture approach as well as its adherence to free software philosophy.
Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments
No comments:
Post a Comment