IDG News Service - Ian Murdock, the chief technology officer of the Linux Foundation and the creator of the Debian Linux distribution, today began his new job as chief operating platforms officer at Sun Microsystems Inc.
Murdock made the announcement on his blog.
"It is with regrets that I leave the Linux Foundation, but if you haven't figured out already, Sun is a company I've always loved," Murdock wrote.
Murdock said his duties as chief operating platforms officer are as yet undefined, but Simon Phipps, the chief open-source officer at Sun, wrote on his blog SunMink that Murdock will be "responsible for building a new strategy to evolve both Sun's Solaris and GNU/Linux strategies."
Sun has embraced open source in recent years, after being hit hard by the technology downturn, which had hurt its proprietary Solaris operating system and Sparc platform family. Sun recently open-sourced Solaris and its Java code for writing software applications. It also installs other open-source Linux operating systems and software applications in addition to other brands of processors on its servers and other hardware.
"The last several years have been hard for Sun, but the corner has been turned," Murdock wrote. "Now, I'm going to be a part of it."
He was not available for an interview.
Murdock developed the Debian Linux distribution in 1992.
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