To Ian's family and the Debian community, The XEmacs developers, testers, and user community offer our condolences on the passing of Ian Murdock. His spirit and leadership will be missed especially in the Debian Project, of course, but his contributions to the ideology of free software, to theory and practice of community building in software development, and to the practical management of distributions will live on as a fitting memorial to the man. Though I don't know of any of the XEmacs core developers who interacted with Ian personally, XEmacs as a project owes much to Linux distributions, and the many distributions in turn owe much to Debian, which now has some very famous "children" (eg, Ubuntu) and even "grandchildren" (Mint) among the popular distributions. Surely this is a testament to the great ideas of the founders of the Debian distribution, and especially Ian himself. A large share of the development of XEmacs (and later, our sister project SXEmacs) takes place on Linux-based systems, and I am sure I'm not the only one who uses Debian. Certainly developers and users are Ubuntu-based, and thus owe much of the development of their systems to the volunteers of Debian. And even those XEmacs developers whose primary interest was our Windows port would often use Linux as well to develop "generic code" that they found useful, though I don't know if any used Debian or derived distributions. I myself started with Slackware and BOGUS Linux in late 1994, but soon moved to Debian GNU/Linux. My first presentation to the Tokyo Linux Users Group in 1996 or 1997 was on the advantages of the Debian dependency resolution system in a point/counterpoint presentation with an RPM advocate. My mail and web hosts (including tracker.xemacs.org, which I host and admin) have run Debian ever since. Though I have experimented with other distributions, one reason I was comfortable doing that was the knowledge that Debian would always be available for "production" hosts and as a competent alternative in any application. Though its software distribution has been the basis for development platforms, user environments, and business, of course Debian is much more than a bag of bytes. Ian's vision of a community-developed distribution has borne much fruit. It's not the only way to develop free software, and Debian was not the only pioneer, but Debian's decentralized but democratic governance has been a model for many projects, and I daresay it has influenced the conduct of all free and open source software projects, including those that happen to be managed by business firms. It certainly has informed my own activity as an XEmacs Review Board member. The Debian Free Software Guidelines are as important a reference for advocates of free and open source software as the definitions published by the FSF and the OSI. While distribution management is now a component of many languages as well as operating systems, Debian has been a leader and model in both theory and practice of distributing complex component systems for over two decades. XEmacs, like many free software projects, owes much to the availability of free operating systems like Debian. Even those of us who did not or do not use Debian directly are in debt for Debian's contributions to distribution development (even one of the earliest free software distributions for the Macintosh platform was based on dpkg), and for the many contributions of Debian and Debian-based developers to the libraries and operating environments we depend on both as developers and users. Software distributions are often likened to living things, and certainly the Debian GNU/Linux distribution is among the most vibrant and vivacious of distros. I pray for the consolation of Ian's family and friends, knowing that his ideas and his work live on in the distribution he founded. Thank you, Ian! Long live Debian! for the XEmacs Review Board and the community of XEmacs developers and users Stephen J. Turnbull Tsukuba, Japan January 16, 2016 _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Announce mailing list XEmacs-Announce(a)xemacs.org http://lists.xemacs.org/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-announce _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://lists.xemacs.org/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta