Interesting announcement from Sun today (Tim Bray had it first, I think) that Ian Murdock of Debian fame is joinging Sun as their “Chief Operating Platforms Officer.” Smart move by Sun; it’ll be interesting to see what comes of it. Ian’s got serious open source chops and even though Debian itself has been languishing of late (he blames the political process), Debian-based Ubuntu has been flourishing. Sal Darji last week pointed out that Canonical just released a server version of Ubuntu.

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Hi all,It’s being announced today that I’m joining Sun as chief operating platforms officer, which basically means I’ll be in charge of Sun’s operating system strategy, spanning Solaris and Linux. I just posted the announcement on my blog (http://ianmurdock.com/2007/03/19/joining-sun/), and it’ll likely be making the rounds soon. Just wanted to make sure you heard the news directly from me and to introduce myself.First things first: I’m a long time Linux user, developer, and advocate.

I founded Debian in 1993, co-founded a Linux distribution company called Progeny in 1999, and most recently served as CTO of the new Linux Foundation, where I was (and still am) chair of the LSB, the Linux platform interoperability standard. I’m also a long time Sun fan.

As for what I’ll be doing: While I’m coming in with some fairly formed opinions about what Sun/Solaris/OpenSolaris ought to do (peruse my blog a bit to learn more), I’m also a big believer in listening before talking, and I have a lot of listening to do in the weeks to come. So, please, feel free to drop me a line if you have anything to tell me. And, please, be gentle while I get settled. :-)

Gotta get on a call in a few minutes. In the meantime, I just wanted to say hello, and to make sure you heard the news directly from me.

Later,

-ian
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Ian Murdock
http://ianmurdock.com