If you’ve ever used Linux, you’ve probably heard of the Debian distribution of the Linux kernel and the associated software that make up the thing that you run on your computer or server. It hasn’t been everyone’s first choice for a distribution, but so many other projects owe their inner workings to borrowed code from the Debian project.
Valve’s SteamOS.
Ubuntu Linux.
There are dozens more here, over a hundred more here, and the maintainers of packages for Debian contribute to hundreds of other free software projects that keep the very fabric of the internet and systems that serve you in the rest of your life functioning and it’s been going for twenty-two years.
Debian is just one of the massive projects that Ian Murdock created, and he’s passed on. Murdock’s recent employer, Docker, has posted a memorial as has Debian.
A few months before he passed, Ian wrote an excellent post about how he came to find out about Linux and the people who made it:
I became enraptured not so much by Linux itself as by the process in which it had been created–hundreds of people hacking away at their own little corner of the system and using the Internet to swap code, slowly but surely making the system better with each change–and set out to make my own contribution to the growing community, a new distribution called Debian that would be easier to use and more robust because it would be built and maintained collaboratively by its users, much like Linux.
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