1973–2015 · Founder of Debian; namesake of "Deb-ian" (with wife Debra)
Also known as: Murdock
Ian Murdock founded the Debian Project in August 1993, combining his wife Debra's name with his own. Debian's social contract, free-software guidelines, democratic governance, and .deb package format shaped every subsequent community Linux distribution.
Debian is the base for Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Raspberry Pi OS, and many others. Roughly half of all Linux installations trace to Debian through a derivative.
Related people: Linus Torvalds, Mark Shuttleworth
Works cited in this book:
- The Debian Linux Manifesto (1994)
Discussed in:
- Chapter 2: A History of Unix and Linux · The Linux Explosion: 1993-2005
