Details Regarding Ian Murdock's Untimely Passing Remain Scarce

[wargames]

Murdock was harassed by aggressive police officers. This led to his mental breakdown. A police officer beat him.

Probably by this one:

[F1esDgSdUTYpm0iy]

Honestly, this whole development is bizarre; I smell something far more foul than police brutality being at work here. Far more foul indeed.

[karolherbst]

but why?

[Nille_kungen]

Honestly, this whole development is bizarre; I smell something far more foul than police brutality being at work here. Far more foul indeed.

Why and what?
I do not like what some say about Ian i saw him as a good person and find it very displeasing to read things that some people makes up about him after his passing.

[dungeon]

“The police are uneducated, evil, and sadistic. Do not trust them,” Murdock wrote. “The rest of my life is to fight against the police.. they are NOT friends, so don’t ever ever believe otherwise.”

I think that Debian Project should adopt policy that there should be never ever be police package in main That way you will secure your win in the fight against them forever.

Also it would be nice if that PD starts to use Debian - that should at least simbolicaly show if they even trying to be friends or not

[iwbcman]

The internet is a cold place, so many freezing to death in the warm embrace of faceless anonymity. I have read a few tributes to Ian's passing, but aside from cursory overviews I have yet to see anything posted that I feel does Ian justice. I never knew the man and until his passing never realized that I am(was) 4 years his senior. I cannot do him justice, but Ian did so much and was so much to so many people that it may take some time for people to learn about all of his contributions, now that his absence is permanently with us. I would like to see the projects and communities that he gave birth to as his children, Debian, Docker, OpenSolaris etc, as a kind of digital transcendence, Ian is no longer with us, but that of him lives on with us. But my heart still goes out to those who knew him personally.

A little word about about Debian. I first installed Linux, back in '93, when a friend of mine from U of L brought some 30 3.5" (it was either Yggdrasil or SLS/Slackware)
diskettes over to my apartment. Unfortunately my graphic cards at the time did not have enough memory to run X. in '94 I moved to Germany for my studies and by fall of '95 there were Linux magazines in every kiosk, so I ended up installing SuSE(no KDE or GNOME yet, window maker/enlightenment) ftw! Being new to Linux I ran into many problems and would go out into the internet looking for help. Although I do not remember Debain being announced/launched, I do remember it quickly becoming the go to community for all things Linux(if you had a computer problem someone from Debian had run into it before and already resolved it). The problem was and perhaps still is, don't know, that Debian was not only the first large scale hardcore Free Software hacker community, which spawned their own distribution, but also that it was from it's inception a community in where all Users were Developers(Users=Developers). Being a mere user back in the day meant that the Debian forums were really cold, uninviting spaces, dominated by people who at once were quite knowledgeable but also quite arrogant. So initially I disliked Debian, what bunch of frigging a##holes(I did however, even back then recognize, the quality of their work). My appreciation and respect for Debian didn't come until many, many years later. Now in hindsight it is clear to me that a community where users=developers is actually a community of empowered users, that most of of my contentious interactions on Debian forums back in the day were the result of a split, a gulf of empowerment, a product of frustration due to being an unempowered mere user at the time. In hindisght Debian doors were always open, but I as an outsider only saw closed doors. I remained an unempowered user for the duration of my time with SuSE (95-'99), only when I jumped on the Gentoo bandwagon did I begin to actually learn anything. Gentoo's forums were the antithesis of Debians and in a relatively short time I went from being an unempowered mere user to a regular forum contributor who was able to answer other peoples questions. Gentoo was my home for about 5 years, nowadays I am more distro agnostic than ever before, swithcing back and forth between fedora, antergos, and mint. My real appreciation for Debian began when Ubuntu came out(ironically the first user-friendly Debian-based distribution). The work of the Debian community, all those Debian Maintainers, is simply staggering, their repository being by far the largest collection of Free Software, and Debian's hallmark is well maintained code. Looking back over 22 years of Linux experience I can clearly see that the project/community initially spawned by Ian Murdock has grown into an unstoppable community of empowered users from all over the world, maintaining the worlds Free Software. Thanks Ian, for giving unto us that of you.

[L_A_G]

If you read his twitter posts leading up to the suicide he ether got messed up really badly by the police or was dealing with some serious mental problems the police only made worse.

Ether way, what I'm seeing is basically the police in the U.S acting as terribly as they always act. The insanely low amount of training that members of police receive before they get to go out on the street and enforce the law is probably a big part of the reason why the police in the U.S is as unprofessional as it is. Where I come from even dockworkers receive about the same amount of training as U.S patrolmen and police training lasts 3 years in it's entirety. Against that background it's really no wonder that you have so many police shootings, however I suspect the "If in doubt - Shoot em"-training they receive is a bigger contributor to how often kids with toy guns or people just trying to run away get shot to death by police.

I also see that feminists and the political correctness crowd are reacting the same way they always do whenever they see an opportunity to get on their "Everything is racist and sexist" high horse. Now they're trying to get Debian renamed because he said "nigger" in one of the pre-suicide tweets where he obviously wasn't being himself and the fact that he named the distro after his wife.

God help us if they find out that most of the custom chips in the Commodore Amiga have female names and that the original prototype machine, called Lorraine, was named after the chief designer's, i.e Jay Miner's, wife.

[edmon]

God help us if they find that most of the custom chips in the Commodore Amiga have female names and that the original prototype machine, Lorraine, was named after the chief designer's, i.e Jay Miner's, wife.

all this things with "the correctness" will end our known world, because there are ppl which didn't care about other ppl "correctness", as some religion spread in middle east

[SystemCrasher]

The whole story sounds pretty suspicious and police's version of this story just does not looks trustworthy, to say the least. And those who trying to rename distro like this are just bunch of jackals.

[roboman2444]

His final tweets seem either like a mental breakdown, or possibly someone else using his twitter. What is very fishy is that his twitter was deleted shortly after his death. Someone else must've had access.