Ian Murdock (Debian Founder)

Ian Murdock (born 28 April 1973, in Konstanz, Germany) is the founder of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution and Progeny Linux Systems, a company providing services based on commercial distributions of operating systems built over the Linux kernel and distributed under a free software license such as the GNU General Public License (GPL).

He wrote the Debian Manifesto in 1993 while a student at Purdue University, where he earned his bachelor's degree in computer science in 1996. He named Debian after himself and his then-girlfriend Debra - thus Deb(ra) and Ian. They have since married, and then divorced in 2007.

On joining Sun, he led Project Indiana, which he described as "taking the lesson that Linux has brought to the operating system and providing that for Solaris", making a full OpenSolaris distribution with GNOME and userland tools from GNU plus a network-based package management system. From March of 2007 to February of 2010, he was Vice President of Emerging Platforms at Sun, until the company merged with Oracle and resigned his position with the company.