deskthority

The founder of Debian Linux died at age 42. http://www.cio-today.com/article/index. ... 300GBI9QV1 A superior talent has passed from us. May he be troubled no more.

All who use Debian or the many distros derived from it owe him a debt of gratitude.

I use Debian every day as my primary OS, and will probably be using it until I die. I am stunned.

Just goes to show, you can be in the best situation and still be very very unhappy.

Massive loss to the community. o7.

Best situation?

I just read the guy's Wikipedia bio. I'm not into Linux so hadn't heard of him. Sounds like he's had a terrible time since Sun's collapse and ritual burning at the hands of Larry Ellison. Murdock was personally invested in Sun's crusade for open source, and left the company as soon as the evil empire breeched the gates. Doesn't look like he found what he was looking for since then. He didn't wind up in Google, let's put it that way.

Christmas is a tough season for anyone in despair. It's the statistical peak for unseasonal things as diverse as domestic violence and suicides. That sense that everyone else out there is happy, while you are so clearly not, only heightens existing troubles. Whatever part of Murdock's life caught up with him, struck this Christmas. As it does for so many people.

Muirium, it is probably more complicated than that. There is something really odd about this sad event as can be seen in the weird last twits on his (already deleted) Twitter account. Policial brutality? Unstable mental state? For me it looks like he was doing fine in a professional way, it's true the dismiss of Sun was sad, but he was currently working for Docker (the last hype). He also looked more than an engineer than a pure ideological crusader in the Stallman way, so Sun undoing would have been sad but not devastating for him.

Such a huge loss can't believe it ... After being a Slackware user for a long time I have switched to Debian and will use that forever. His contribution to the Open Source is imense. This is really sad

Daniel, you and I state that we will probably be using Debian forever. Just think about that and what it means. As Debian is not owned by a corporation and is truly free, it continues because of the contributions of individuals. There is no corporation to go bankrupt and cause the OS to cease to exist, or influence it in ways that are objectionable. Therefore, we really CAN say that we will be using it forever - and mean it, because it will always exist. That type of statement cannot be used with any commercial OS, nor even a great many Linux distros (Red Hat, Ubuntu, etc.). In that regard, Ian created something far bigger than himself. The nearest analogy I can think of is Torvalds. So you're absolutely right - in the bigger picture, Ian's contribution to computing was huge.

I did not know who this person was, as I am new to Linux. After reading about him, I also did not realize that he lived most of his life in Indiana and also was an executive at a local tech company (Exacttarget/Salesforce).

Thats such a shame , not a huge fan of debian but still a shame.