This is one of many short video segments which will be added to the Digital Tipping Point (DTP) archive. The Digital Tipping Point is very proud to offer this unique interview with Ian Murdock, the founder of Debian, the world's largest GNU-Linux distro.

It really is difficult to exaggerate the importance of the Debian GNU-Linux distribution. Debian is the foundation upon which many other distributions (distros) are built. A distro is one interpretation of the very large collection of packages which form the GNU and Linux code bases, which are collectively sometimes referred to simply as Linux. It is widely believed that even the founders of the GNU and Linux projects, Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, respectively, do not use their own unique versions of the software that they have written. Instead, they both use collections or interpretations of the code that others have brought together. So that gives you an understanding of how important these distros or collections of GNU-Linux are to their users.

And, from a personal perspective, much of the work for this film was done on a Debian derivative, called Ubuntu. Without a Free (as in freedom) and free (as in beer) distro like Debian and Ubuntu, this film project never would have happened.

Software developers often rely on the work of others to create their own versions (distros) of GNU-Linux, and the one distro that they rely on more than any other is Debian. There are many reasons for this practice, but it can easily be summarized as Debian's emphasis on being reliable and truly Free as in free speech.

The one lesson that is most important to keep in mind as you are watching this interview with Ian Murdock is that here you are seeing an extensive and candid interview with the guy who started the world's most popular GNU-Linux distro.

In this series of interviews, Ian talks about the early days of Debian; his family's views of the many unpaid hours he toiled to create Debian along with other developers; the growth of GNU and Linux; how companies make money with GNU-Linux; and Microsoft's reactions to GNU-Linux and Free Open Source Software.

This footage was shot under difficult circumstances, and the footage reflects that context. It was shot in a tiny storage room near a busy restroom in the Desktop Linux Summit for 2004 in San Diego, California. The great thing about shooting at conferences is that you can get lots and lots of big names like Ian Murdock in a short period of time. The downside is that you have very little control over the attire that the interviewees wear; the backdrop to the interview; the acoustics of the room; the lighting in the room, or almost any other circumstances. So Ian's light gray shirt nearly disappears into the backdrop of the storage closet, and the lighting on his face is sub-optimal. But this footage is very real, very spontaneous, and it is a wonderfully candid discussion by one of the truly great thinkers and leaders of the Free Open Source Software movement, Ian Murdock.

If you like this segment, please consider typing up a summary for it and emailing that summary to Christian Einfeldt at einfeld@gmail.com. Your work will be credited and posted on this page.

The DTP will be many, many films created by the global open source video community about how open source is changing their lives. We, the DTP crew, are submitting this footage for anyone to rip, mix, and burn under the Creative Commons Attribute - ShareAlike license. We welcome edits, transcriptions, graphics, music, and animation contributions to the film. Please send a link for any contributions to Christian Einfeldt at einfeldt at digitaltippingpoint.com.

Or, if you would like to contribute by directly transcribing this particular video segment, you can do so by going here:

http://digitaltippingpoint.com/wiki/index.php/Tape_035

and typing the audio as you hear it into the wiki. Please be sure to add the transcription for this segment under: Segment 001, Ian Murdock
You can find other ways to contribute by going to our wiki front page here:

http://digitaltippingpoint.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Thanks for viewing our video!

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