Debian's Murdock to Be CTO at Free Standards Group

Published: February 28, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Ian Murdock, the co-founder of the Debian distribution of Linux with his wife, Deb, and the driving force behind the Debian Common Core Alliance (see Debian Distros Back Common Core Alliance for more), has taken over as chief technology officer of the Free Standards Group.

While Murdock will remain an advisor to Progeny, the company he set up to provide a commercially supported to Debian Linux and custom integration services, Murdock will be spending most of his time as CTO for the Free Standards Group and chair of the Linux Standard Base. Murdock has been a big proponent of LSB, an initiative that seeks to rein in the various commercial Linuxes so they can offer standardized support, making it easier for application providers to ensure their applications run on the myriad commercial Linuxes. Murdock set up the DCC in part to get all of the Debian distributors to back the LSB standards, and now, as chair of that working group, he has the job of ensuring that all Linuxes--not just Debian variants--are brought to the table and together create an LSB standard that they can all agree to. Murdock knows a thing or two about standards--he was a founding director of Linux International and the Open Source Initiative, and was one of the key contributors to the Linux File Hierarchy Standard, a predecessor to the LSB.

"Very quickly in my experience with Debian, I knew a standardized Linux was absolutely imperative to growing the Linux marketplace," said Murdock in a statement. "Developers need a simple way to target Linux, distribution vendors need a core base of functionality to differentiate on top of, and end users need choice and assurance. The Free Standards Group and the Linux Standard Base is the best hope for achieving these goals: it has the momentum, the member support, and the community. By becoming CTO and LSB workgroup chair, I will do everything I can to strengthen Linux around a vendor-neutral, open standard that will increase the Linux market for all community participants."

Murdock immediately takes over the impending launch of LSB 3.1, which will be fleshing out server specs with standards aimed at desktop implementations of Linux, and he will begin work on the roadmap for LSB 4.0 and future specs. Rather than give him the title of CTO, perhaps the Free Standards Group should have called him Chief Cat Herder?