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Debian Founder's 2015 Death Ruled A Suicide (theregister.co.uk)

Posted by BeauHD on from the closure dept.

gosand writes: According to a story on The Register, the death of Ian Murdock in late 2015 has been ruled a suicide. This news brings some closure to the sad ending of his life. An interesting note from the article that I never knew before: "he was the Ian in Debian; his girlfriend at the time, Debra Lynn, was the Deb." Debian has truly been a cornerstone in the Linux world, and the founder will be missed. The medical report was obtained on Wednesday by CNN journalists.

4 of 160 comments (clear)

  1. Is ruled a suicide now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    "Found Murdock naked and lifeless with electrical cord around his neck" is ruled a suicide now?

    1. Re:Is ruled a suicide now? by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 3, Interesting

      A few people I've known have committed suicide, (one of which I was present for) and I can't say a single one of them ever made sense. In talking with other people at Survivors of Suicide, all of the people who go to those meetings basically say to not bother asking yourself why they did it, because you'll most likely never know why. Based on Ian Murdoch's other circumstances, I think it's safe to say that his life was in a somewhat shitty state at the time (see the four reasons I listed in my post above) which is probably why, more than anything else.

  2. ++devuan.... however... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    The GPL'd open source community (Seperate from the BSD camp, which I feel has done a better job of this) really needs to be more vigilant with its community leadership choices. From debian, to mozilla (I know, never really part of the community, but that is an example of why community leadership is important.), to gcc (and assorts co-projects, like glibc), to llvm/clang/libc++, to musl (one of the few ATM success stories).

    There have been leadership both incompetent and intentionally malicious that have derailed, damaged, or otherwise impaired open source projects. One of the differences here is that open source doesn't have the cult-like mentality most corporations instill (my dad for instance still 20 years out from his tech job is rabid about his former company's products over competitors despite it not making sense anymore.) Similiar things happen with corporations vs open source. While there are plenty of corporate 'team players', one needs to watch for the endgame and keep them from corrupting and destroying from within for those Microsoft-like corporations that enjoy destroying 'competition' from within.

  3. As likely a suicide as was by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    Robin Williams, or David Carradine, or Charles Nelson Reilly, lest to not forget to mention Aaron Swartz, Aaron Swartz.