Ian Murdock Joins Sun

Posted on March 19, 2007

This seems like a Big Deal: Ian Murdock has been hired by Sun Microsystems as the new leader of their operating systems strategy unit.

If you don’t know, Murdock is the founder of the Debian Linux distribution. ("Debian" is a contraction of two names — "Ian", and "Deb", his wife.) Debian is one of the most influential distributions out there; beyond those who run it directly, it provides the basis for many other popular distributions, including Ubuntu. Debian has been renowned for years for its commitment to reliability, its innovative package management system, and its dedication to providing a 100% Free Software platform.

I’m not sure what this means for Debian (I don’t know exactly how active Murdock is these days with the distro, since the community around it is large and vibrant), but it’s definitely a great move for Sun, who will now be able to apply Murdock’s expertise to their own Solaris operating system, as well as to the problem of getting Linux to play more nicely with Sun hardware.

UPDATE: Via Slashdot, I found this interview with Murdock where he describes some of his frustrations with Debian of late, describing the current state of Debian as "process run amok". Which might explain why he went to Sun