Debian founder Ian Murdock has passed away

Ian Murdock passed away Monday night at the age of 42. He became known as the founder of Debian, one of the most popular Linux distributions. So far, nothing has been released about the cause of death.

Murdock’s death was announced on Thursday on the blog of Docker, the company he worked for. Little further information is given in the blog post, at the request of Murdock’s family; they ask for privacy. As a result, nothing is known about the cause of death of the 42-year-old, although reports have appeared on his Twitter page about suicide plans and problems with the police.

Murdock’s Twitter page has since been taken offline, leaving no further details on the situation. However, the latest series of messages has been put online on a Pastebin page.

Ian Murdock was born in Germany but studied in the United States, where he founded the Linux distribution Debian in 1993. It was one of the first Linux distributions at the time and the software still enjoys a high degree of popularity. Murdock joined Sun in 2003, then moved to Salesforce in 2011. He had been employed by Docker since November of this year.