Sun's Simon Phipps says: "I'm delighted to be able to welcome a new colleague who's starting with Sun today. He is starting a newly-defined role as Chief Operating Platforms Officer at Sun, and is responsible for building a new strategy to evolve both Sun's Solaris and GNU/Linux strategies. The appointment is at the same time both brilliant and controversial, but is the logical next step as far as I am concerned."
Ian Murdock is the -ian in Debian, which is one of the GNU/Linux distros that actually cares about free as in freedom, and the code that is used as the basis for Ubuntu.
It's certainly controversial, as you can see from the comments on Simon's blog. However, with Sun trending towards the GNU GPL license, the aim is presumably to slide open Solaris (Unix) into the Linux-replacement market. Sure, over "the next 25 years".
Murdock writes about his love affair with Sun on his own blog, saying: "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, and being a part of it was an opportunity I simply could not pass up."
