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Debian daddy Murdock joins the unstoppable Docker crusade

Contain your Linux, folks

Debian daddy Ian Murdock has joined Linux container shop Docker.

Murdock, who founded Debian in 1993 and led the project for three years during its birth, has taken up position as a member of Docker’s technical staff.

Details of Murdock’s role or responsibilities were not available at time of writing.

Docker, though, has a huge interest in perfecting the deployment of Linux applications in its container technology for cloud and micro services. Murdock was, until October, vice president for platform for Salesforce’s marketing cloud. He’d been with the as-a-service provider for four years. He joined Salesforce through the cloud firm’s $2.5bn acquisition of ExactTarget in 2013. ExactTarget was renamed Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Before that, Murdock had occupied different open-source friendly executive positions for Sun Microsystems, including work on operating systems and Project Indiana – the open-sourcing of Solaris as OpenSolaris. That was such a successful project, Sun’s new owner Oracle killed it by chopping off the community.

Murdock was also chief technology officer for the Linux Foundation – but it’s Debian that birthed the legend of Murdock as the developer’s technologist.

Debian was one of the first Linux distros to be forged and regarded as a one of the most successful open-source projects ever launched. The Debian universe consists of more than 43,000 software packages with popular free programmes including LibreOffice and GIMP – Docker is one of the Debian universe’s packages.

The Debian project has grown in manpower, since Murdock’s time, to span more than 1,000 members. There exists 52 distros built on Debian with, arguably, Ubuntu being the best-known and most successful of them. By extension, a host of Ubuntu spinoffs also use Debian.

Debian is available in 73 languages and on ARM, AMD, Intel, MIPS, Power and z architectures, running on desktop – with the Gnome – on server and in embedded. ®

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