A Dorm Room in 1993. The International Space Station Today. One Person the Industry Forgot.

Deb and Ian. A 20-year-old's act of love is now the foundation on which billions of lines of code run. The relationship lasted 14 years. The name will last forever.

Hundreds of millions of devices. One person nobody came back for.

In August 1993, a 20-year-old computer science student at Purdue University created a Linux distribution and named it after his girlfriend, Debra Lynn Roundy, and himself, Ian Murdock. Debian. The project would go on to become what the community calls "the Universal Operating System," running on everything from embedded devices to the International Space Station. Over 350 Linux distributions, including the most popular ones like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and Ubuntu derivatives, trace their lineage to the code Ian Murdock started writing in his dorm room.

On December 28, 2015, Ian Murdock died in San Francisco. He was 42 years old.

This is the story of the person behind the project, not just the code. And this is one of the stories that touches me so hard that every time I read it, I have ultimate mixed feelings. I decided to write this story to remember and document properly.

If this story stays with you, share it. The open source community still hasn't built what Ian Murdock built for Debian: structures that protect the people inside them.