Ian Murdock is vice president of Emerging Platforms at Sun Microsystems, where he is a member of the senior leadership team of Sun's cloud computing group working at the intersection of open source and cloud computing. Previously, Murdock was vice president of Developer and Community, responsible for Sun's developer strategy, marketing, and programs; and chief OS Platform Strategist, where he launched Project Indiana, the effort designed to lower barriers to adoption for the Solaris platform that led to the OpenSolaris distribution.

Prior to joining Sun, Murdock was Chief Technology Officer of the Linux Foundation and cofounder of Progeny, a provider of custom Linux platform technology. A longtime Linux user, developer, and advocate, Murdock founded the Debian project in 1993. Today, Debian is one of the most popular Linux distributions in the world, with millions of users worldwide. Debian is also widely considered one of the most successful and influential open source projects ever launched with more than 1,000 volunteers in all parts of the world are currently involved in Debian development, and the founding document of the open source movement itself was originally a Debian position statement. Ian was also a founding director of the Open Source Initiative (1998-2001).