RIP Ian Murdoch

[BlkHawk]

Many of you probably do not know who this man was, but he has had an effect on your daily life none the less. He founded Debian a Linux Distro that is used all over the world, and which many other distros are based upon not limited to: Ubuntu, Mint and deepin.

A tribute to his life and work:http://www.theguardian.com/technolo...ck-a-tribute-to-the-man-and-his-work-on-linux

Back in 1993, Linux itself was less than two years old and a year away from version 1.0. Collaborating with him was his then-wife Deborah Lynn – she was the Deb of Debian, and he was the ian. He also created the apt-get package manager.

Let’s pause here to explain what those are, because our lives would likely not be the same without them.

First, Linux is the operating system on which countless websites and services, such as Google’s and Amazon’s, are built. It is embedded in many billions of devices, such as Android phones. That’s because choosing to build software on Linux today is kind of like choosing to build a house using frame construction. You’re going to put your floors, walls, ceilings and roof on a frame of studs, joists, headers and braces. Linux, or something like it (such as the derivative of a competitor that lies at the base of Apple’s OS X) is the hidden stuff on top of which all the visible stuff is added.

But Linux is just what’s called a kernel. What makes the kernel useful is a distribution you might compare to the truck that hauls in your building materials. Then your main tool box is the package manager. With the apt-get command, software installs itself. In a 2007 blog post, Murdock explained why package management was “the biggest advancement Linux brought to the industry”.

“It used to be that operating systems were big, monolithic products, and applications were big, monolithic products you put on top of them,” he wrote.

“If you wanted to deploy, say, a web application, you sourced the middleware stack (which itself was probably several big products too), you sourced the operating system, and you (often painfully) had to integrate the two yourself – or pay a big company lots of money to do it for you.

“These days, you increasingly just ‘apt-get install whatever’.”

Debian and apt-get succeeded for organizational as well as technical reasons. Like Linux, Debian was produced and constantly improved by a community of programmers who shared common beliefs and principles about how code should be created, improved and shared.

After a mental breakdown, posting suicidal messages, and an encounter with police he took his own life on Monday.
http://sfbay.ca/2015/12/31/police-confirm-ian-murdock-arrest-before-suicide/

I hope this encourages more people to involve themselves in getting help for mentally ill loved ones who are not thinking clearly, before it is to late.

I have been using software derived from his work since 1996, his is the senseless loss of a truly great man.

 

[BlinkAgain]

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R.I.P. Ian. Your creation has outlived you, and here's hoping that it continues to prosper... and work properly without becoming Lennartian.