DebIan’s Sun (Executive Moves…)

Ian Murdock, founder of Debian, is moving to Sun MIcrosystems. I’ve known Ian since 2002, and have profound respect for him. He’s the sort of person that is willing to “zig” when others “zag.”

Now is no different, as the world shifts to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ian is taking on Red Hat with a Sun visor on:

Everything I know about computing I learned on those Sun workstations, as did so many other early Linux developers; I even had my own for a while, after I joined the University of Arizona computer science department in 1997. But within a year, the Suns were starting to disappear, replaced by Pentiums running Red Hat Linux. More and more people coming through university computer science programs were cutting their teeth on Linux, much as I had on Sun. Pretty soon, Sun was increasingly seen by this new generation as the vendor who didn’t “get it”, and Sun’s rivals did a masterful job running with that and painting the company literally built on open standards as “closed”. To those of us who knew better, it was a sad thing to watch.

The last several years have been hard for Sun, but the corner has been turned. As an outsider, I’ve watched as Sun has successfully embraced x86, pioneered energy efficiency as an essential computing feature, open sourced its software portfolio to maximize the network effects, championed transparency in corporate communications, and so many other great things. Now, I’m going to be a part of it.

He’ll be heading operating system platform strategy, a role perfectly suited to him and one that lets him explore the best of his Progeny-esque ideas.

Good luck, Ian, and welcome back to the wonderful world of open source competition. We’re better for having you with us.