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Debian Founder Ian Murdock Has Died (docker.com)
Unknown Lamer writes: It has been confirmed that Debian founder Ian Murdock has died. From the Docker blog: "It is with great sadness that we inform you that Ian Murdock passed away on Monday night. This is a tragic loss for his family, for the Docker community, and the broader open source world; we all mourn his passing. ... Ian helped pioneer the notion of a truly open project and community, embracing open design and open contribution; in fact the formative document of the open source movement itself (the Open Source Definition) was originally a Debian position statement. It is a testament to Ian's commitment to openness and community that there are now more than 1,000 people currently involved in Debian development."
So all the race baiting about police brutality and how nobody believed him because he was white (and not a "n*gger" - his words) leading to a massively publicized suicide-note-rant-against-the-police on his twitter, that was actually covered on a similar website to this one, was legit? And nobody stepped in or did a gd*** thing?
And what great parting words he left for us:
Maybe my suicide at this, you now, a successful business man, not a NIGGER, will finally bring some attention to this very serious issue.
Suicide.
How is it non of their business? The dude was threatening suicide on Twitter. That hardly is a bastion of privacy.
Yeah he did:
Maybe my suicide at this, you now, a successful business man, not a NIGGER, will finally bring some attention to this very serious issue.
what? biggest demographic for suicide is white males 35-64, and since 1999 up 30+ percent
over police brutality he says, hmmm maybe some other things and this plus some substance abuse was trigger
How is it non of their business? The dude was threatening suicide on Twitter. That hardly is a bastion of privacy.
His family is asking for it now and there's no reason not to honor that. It changes nothing and gives them the space they need and deserve.
Goodbye from a Debian Developer. Thanks for all the fish
Note to self:
Never, never give up after torture, abuse or rape. Few can send a real signal by killing himself. Suicide destroys the meaning of one's suffering.
Live to the end. Live and fight the injustice. Live and tell the truth.
i remember him as a genuinely nice guy. 15ish years ago, when i was a naive youngster just starting with gnu/linux (progeny linux), i often got stuck on pretty basic stuff. one day i simply emailed him and asked these absolutely beginner's questions about partitioning and debian installer. he, the legendary debian founder, took his time and patiently explained things to me. we exchanged over 50 emails that year. i wish i still had that mbox file. we kept in touch until he started working for sun.
Your uptime was shorter than normal, but you were a master of creation and you served the community well.
My theory is Hans Reiser.
The bizarre nature of those last tweets and the fact that the attached email domain on those was imurdock.com rather than his actual website which is ianmurdock.com makes this situation very suspicious. I hope more information is release soon as it seems highly likely foul play is involved.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
and I am ashamed to live in a society where there was no one around to help him find a better way through this.
His family asked for privacy. People are trying to give it to them.
That said, there's a The Register Article that implies some erratic mental state. All the more reason to not pry and not guess. They're having a very hard time. Our best tribute to what Ian has done is not to make his family worse off.
If there's anything we could reconstruct out of the fragments, he probably suffered torture at the hand of police.
I think about the most we can say right now is that he probably wasn't in a rational state of mind.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It looks like He blamed it on Police Brutality. Some sort of incident happened where he claims(ed) he was beaten by the police badly enough to go to the hospital, got home, was assaulted again by police.
http://pastebin.com/yk8bgru5
I am very, very sad to hear this news. Debian GNU/Linux has brought much joy to my life. Thank You and Rest in Peace, Ian Murdock.
-drew (@pdp7)
He committed suicide after being beaten up by police (requiring hospitalization as a result) and then charged with assaulting a police officer. I'm not sure where "going mentally unhinged on Twitter" comes from, but his last tweets were angry, not unhinged.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
There's every reason not to honor it: it was the last wish of the deceased that we use his death as a springboard to discuss issues that the was, at least at the end, very passionate about. Fuck the family. Fuck their discomfort with the topic being cause to cover up the reason behind this man's death. He had his own values and wishes, and they should be respected; not whitewashed to make a few soon-wealthy beneficiaries a little more comfortable.
People deciding on suicide for real rarely make future plans, but his last tweets were full of them. I wonder about head trauma, mostly because of the extreme confusion here. Note his first line. He didn't want anyone to stop him from killing himself, because he had stories that he wanted to tell.
Why is Barack Obama not white? Is it because he has more than zero drops of native Kenyan blood in him? If that is the case, aren't you in all actuality subscribing to the 'one drop of blood / white is the norm' position? And if you don't - because that would be quite racist - then why is Obama black? He has a 'white' mother after all... And if your position is that 'he identifies as black', then can he change his mind tomorrow? And if he can't, then at what age do people get to choose their 'race'? And if he can, what in the name of bloody bollocks does an outdated concept of 'race' even mean outside the industry that breeds cats, dogs and horses?
Race is a load of meaningless crap. Humans like to fark too much for it to exist. It has no concept in biology, and even in its last hold-out - sociology - it can easily be degraded to meaninglessness, see the reasoning above.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Old programmers never die. They redirect to /dev/null. RIP, Ian.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
This is based upon what exactly?
Given he was hospitalized that night - because of injuries from his confrontation with police - and given he was subsequently released, it seems improbable he was on some psychotic bender.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I certainly will not believe any official reports - the fact that they're late means they're being cooked, without doubt. Some multi-millionaires out there need to make sure to get all the way to the bottom of this.
And if your position is that 'he identifies as black', then can he change his mind tomorrow? And if he can't, then at what age do people get to choose their 'race'? And if he can, what in the name of bloody bollocks does an outdated concept of 'race' even mean outside the industry that breeds cats, dogs and horses?
These question contain a raft of invalid assumptions.
Clearly, race is a social construct, not a genetic one, and anyone who tells you otherwise hasn't looked closely enough at the question. This means that to a large degree people do choose what race they are. Obviously there is no age by which people must make that choice, but that's not because there is no choice to be made, but because they're perfectly free to change their choice at any point in time. Racial identity is really just a form of tribalism, and people absolutely can choose to move from one tribe to another.
However, that in no way implies that changing tribes is easy, because what tribe you're a member of depends less on what you think than on what the other members of the tribe think. Tribal boundaries are fluid, dynamic and context-dependent, but they shift based on group decisions, not individual decisions. Witness the public hue and cry over Rachel Dolezal.
But, in fact, people do change their racial identity. A 2010 study found that going to prison can turn white people black. Specifically, people who previously self-identified and were identified by researchers as white committed crimes, went to prison, and subsequently self-identified -- and were identified by researchers -- as non-white, in most cases black.
Could Barack Obama decide to be white? Sure. He could decide to self-identify as white, and he could announce that to the world. The response would be a mixture of bafflement, outrage and laughter, and no one would buy it, because his tribal membership is too strongly and publicly established.
Race is a load of meaningless crap.
Any notion of genetic, objective race is meaningless crap, sure. But tribal identity is very, very far from meaningless. For many people racial identity is a central part of their individual identity. Identity is powerful... people befriend, ostracize, even kill over identity.
Note that I'm not saying this is good, or right, or in any way desirable. We'd all be a lot better off if everyone discarded racial identity from their personal worldviews. But that's not the world we live in, and calling it meaningless, ostrich-like, is foolish.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Others have already pointed out that said message is posted with a domain name that isn't known to be associated to him and is designed to look like it is his normal domain (imurdock versus ianmurdock) and which doesn't match any of his previous twitter posts.
This makes the messages entirely of suspicious origin.
This hits very close to home for me. I was also arrested for felony battery and held by the SFPD. (The San Mateo County sheriffs, who police Caltrain, were the ones to make the arrest, but I was taken to the SFPD jail.) That's the only time I've ever been in jail, and it seriously fucked with me. I always thought that I would be able to handle jail/prison - hah, wrong! It's a completely dehumanizing experience.
When I first got there, I was thrown in the drunk tank and left for hours. (After a false felony battery charge, why not a false drunk in public charge?) Like Ian, I couldn't find out anything about my situation. The guards refused to answer any of my questions. There was a phone in the cell, but it was next to useless because everyone I called was unable to navigate the byzantine collect call system. (I briefly wrote about this in a previous comment in an earlier story.) The only things to do were to ponder how truly fucking scary it would be if I were eventually tried and convicted or stare at the ceiling and wonder if the stains were feces or peanut butter from the disgusting sandwiches they provided. I'm a self-confident, mentally-stable person, but that started evaporating disturbingly fast.
Things got a little better for me once they moved me from the drunk tank to a regular cell. I finally made some progress on getting bail. They took my mugshot and started processing the fingerprint/background checks. At this point, at least there was a light at the end of the tunnel. While things were looking up for me, at this point I started seeing the more fucked up shit other people were going through. The majority of the people in my new cell were making phone calls to anyone who would answer (this phone made local calls free) trying to scrounge together bail. While I was mad as hell that I was throwing away >$2,000 in bail (10% of the $25k that Ian mentioned), I'm well-off and would have spent far more to get the hell out of there. This was a Friday night, and you wouldn't get arraigned until Monday morning if you couldn't make bail. It was heartbreaking to watch these guys make call after call for bail money that they just didn't have. In retrospect, maybe I should have helped them out, but at the time I was doing my best to keep to myself.
The low point for me was one point when I saw a number of guards rushing to some situation. I couldn't see what was going on, but it was a few minutes of a lot of shouting and one voice yelping in pain. I then saw 5-6 officers manhandling an inmate to lead him to a cell. They were forcing him to do some reverse crabwalk sorta thing with his wrists chained down by his ankles, all while he's clearly in pain and protesting that he didn't do anything. This is when it really dawned on me how much these corrupt fucks can control your lives. I was confined to this cell of thick glass and concrete because of a lie. Once in jail, there's virtually nothing stopping them from using further lies to justify abuse. I have no clue if the inmate actually did something wrong or was being abused by sadistic guards, but I sure as hell wasn't going to believe the guards (who are sheriffs) just after being falsely arrested by one of their fellow officers.
Eventually my bail went through, the background check came back clean, and I was going to be released soon. For some reason I don't understand, they again transferred me to another cell. When we got there, it was full of what I stereotyped as mentally ill homeless people. One dude was lying on the floor drooling and shaking. I could not deal with this and froze up. Ignoring that this man clearly needed to be in a hospital instead of a jail, all I could do was ask to go back to the previous cell. Thankfully, it wasn't a sheriff but an administrative employee moving me around at this point, and he was sympathetic enough to take me back to the previous cell. That was the only shred of humanity I saw from anyone who worked at the jail, and it's not
You know I asked my grandfather about the weird banker deaths, Swartz's death and now this one this evening and he had a interesting response:
"During the purge in the 1930's lots of people went missing. Mainly individuals in societal roles that some in society are not happy with."
I replied: "But these people had families and nobody hated them they did interesting things and certainly were not criminals."
His response?
"Not criminal perhaps to you and me, but those in power have their own rule of law."
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I wrote A Requiem for Ian Murdock.
Any sign of the bruises / beating? When did it occur? I'm curious wtf happened and when it happened
Also, nothing on his web page, did someone revert it? Anyone got a cached copy?
Are you daft? Race is not a social construct. Have you ever seen black people? They have a completely different skin colour from white people. That's a fact, not a social construct. It proves that different races of human beings exist.
Your SJW attitude to *facts* is appalling, retract it.
Is Obama black or white? Are Kazakhs arab, asian, or a different race? What about Moroccans? Are the East African ethnicities that dominate the marathon the same race as the Jamaicans who dominate sprinting? Their skin colour is the same but the body types are drastically different.
You can draw a dividing line one the colour scale and call every darker than that "black" and everyone lighter "white" or some other ethnicity, but it's not nearly as meaningful as we imagine. We use that characteristic because it's the easiest to see, but if we started grouping by some other gene variants then we would get a drastically different set of races.
I stole this Sig
No, there is every reason to honor their wishes. His family presumably wants privacy because they don't want to see anyone's memory of him be tarnished, and most likely that's because he obviously committed suicide in a non-suspicious manner after having some kind of mental breakdown. Which may have been the culmination of some kind of ongoing series of mental breakdowns that they'd rather not have him be remembered by.
The guy threatened suicide, and ranted about the police, and then stated that "my career is over now, so I'll be gone soon". It's fucking idiotic to suggest that the family is in on a police coverup of his murder or whatever the fuck crazy ideas people are having all because they might inherit some dollars, or that they're threatened, or that they just feel so terrible about him being murdered that they don't want to ever think about it again.
The guy's last wish was to kill himself. I wish it hadn't happened, because he did a hell of a lot for Linux. Doing a little bit for his wife and kids and family in return is the least anyone could do. Go fuck yourself if you're some kind of conspiratorial moron who would use his name to feed your fantasies without a SINGLE piece of evidence otherwise.
This is horrible.
Having gone through the data I could find this evening, it appears that Ian was a victim of mental illness and perhaps substance abuse which initiated two interactions with police. I do not have sufficient information to say if police conduct was at fault.
He was a very bright and creative guy who, unfortunately went through lots of ups and downs. He didn't deserve to end this way. Nobody does.
Bruce Perens.
Everybody has problems. Everybody deserves consideration form them. SJWs are just the ultimate in racism, sexism, etc. and are at heart fascists that want to humiliate and destroy everybody except their chosen group "victims". A force of evil and destruction to be sure.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.