In August 1993, Ian Murdock founded the Debian project and nurtured the free open source operating system into one of the most popular Linux distributions, supported by an established community of developers.
 Ian Murdock |
Today, Debian is used by thousands of individuals and various large and small businesses worldwide, though no concrete numbers are available since users are not required to register.
In March 2007, Murdock joined Sun Microsystems and is currently the company's vice president of developer and community marketing.
ZDNetAsia sat down for a chat with the long-time Linux user, developer and advocate at the Sun Tech Days developer conference, held recently in Hyderabad, India.
In this exclusive interview, Murdock explains why he joined the IT vendor and discusses the ideology behind Project Indiana.
Q: Let's go back to 1993, when you were studying at the Purdue University. What was it that drew you to open source?
Murdock: It happened quite by accident. I was trying to build my own approximation of a Sun workstation. I converted my desktop at home into a Unix workstation. So that's the accident part of the story.
What drew me to open source was the community around it, the fact that it even existed in the first place, and this collaborative exercise and the people involved in it. They didn't have a master plan, and sometimes didn't even see each other or speak the same language. It was remarkable.
Was it an anti-Microsoft sentiment that drew them together?
Not really. It was a collection of things. Most of us were students. So we were excited about learning technology and how it worked. It gave us a real life, hands on experience to work with software.
But there were simpler reasons too, like, it was fun.
It will soon be a year since you joined Sun. Tell us about your role and what drew you to the company.
What initially drew me to the company was this desire to replicate Sun's technology. As I got into the free software world and into Linux, Sun fell out of my radar, to be honest. It came back into my radar in a big way three years back, with OpenSolaris.
But then I quickly found that OpenSolaris was not quite what I expected it to be. I was expecting to go down an operating system called OpenSolaris, and install it much as I would do with OpenSuse or any other Linux distribution system.
I have always watched Sun as a company and jumped at the opportunity to join it. My main objective, while undertaking Project Indiana, was to look at OpenSolaris as a developer. As a member of my target audience, the Linux developer community, my mandate was to look at how I could help reshape OpenSolaris so that it would appeal to people like me and make this great technology, Solaris, broadly accessible and more familiar to the Linux developer population.
Over the past one year, we have done some interesting work, like building appliances or external open source software around Solaris.
Can you elaborate on that, as well as Project Indiana?
Solaris has always had a very monolithic structure. The basic idea behind Project Indiana was to take the Linux distribution model, which allows for very flexible and agile incorporation of open source technologies, and apply that same thinking to OpenSolaris, thereby pulling in more open source technologies.
The world thinks those open source technologies are all about Linux, but Linux is just a kernel. When you are talking about Linux, you are talking about the open source software around it.
With a modular structure like that, you can do all sorts of interesting things. You can strip down the operating system and specialize it. You look at some of the interesting things that the Linux community has done.
I think you are going to see similar things coming out of Sun, such as using OpenSolaris with a new structure as the basis of a whole new range of specialized Solaris-based products. We would then take those products to the market.
What happens to Linux?
Linux will continue to do well. The main problem that Linux has is that it is not entirely clear about what it is.
Technically speaking, Linux is just a term. It is a kernel, which is part of an operating system. I think in some sense, the term Linux has become generic. It stands for open source operating system that incorporates open source technologies. It is as much of a concept as it is the specifics of a technology.
There is so much talk of Web 2.0 and open source. What, in your view, will Web 3.0 be like?
To be honest, I am not even sure what Web 2.0 is. I mean, it is still evolving.
On the future, I think we are going to see a continuation of what has been happening. We will continue to see applications moving on to the Web and social interactions, and data becoming more and more central to those applications.
Earlier, application and data were separate. In future, we will see all your data in the cloud somewhere so that you can access it anytime, anywhere. But it won't work for rich client devices, and synchronization is going to be a big issue in the future.
You mentioned open source in the context of Web 3.0. Open source has to evolve. Today, it is more of a concept. Even though these are new technologies, they are not open source. There are several issues that need to be addressed. For instance, data portability, interoperability and how you combine the best features of different platforms.
Do you think everything could be free and open source in the future? Even specialized ERP (enterprise resource planning) packages?
Ten years back, I would have thought it would never happen. In fact, I think 10 years back, I mentioned somewhere that ERP is clearly proprietary. But increasingly, you see companies such as SugarCRM, launching open source CRM (customer relationship management) software.
Swati Prasad is a freelance IT writer based in India.
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