The Curious Case of Ian Murdock

Since debian is free, I can't imagine he was a person of wealth, but I guess that really doesn't matter. It's too bad he didn't pursue this legally, I don't get it specially right now with the negative spotlight on the police lately. It should have been easy there is obviously more to it. He was obviously a smart guy, and there is much more to this. 

Rickster,

Murdock actually was working for Docker at the time of his death. Between founding Debian, Murdock worked for Sun Microsystems as their VP of Emerging Platforms up until their merger with Oracle at which time he resigned. After that he worked for Salesforce Marketing Cloud, yet again as a VP, up until November 2015. Salesforce has an annual revenue of around $292 million and generally, executives would be paid in a mixture of salary plus revenue based bonuses, including stock options. With Murdock's career history, it's possible that his income was rather elevated. His position at Docker, Inc, was as a "member of technical staff" according to his Linkedin. Docker was initially released in 2013 so it's possible that Murdock was hopping onto the "next thing".

The entire thing is very strange. I've seen a lot of commentary on reddit talking about whether Murdock was even in his right mind at the time that he was making those tweets. Given that Murdock reported that he had to go to the hospital and had bruising as evidence, some trail of evidence as to whether his allegations occurred or not should exist...one would think, at least. He also was tweeting the NAACP according to a Pastebin of his tweets; however, one can never tell with pastebins in regards to legitimacy.

omegalogos,

Not so sure on the mind control thing. I'd say that it's pretty safe to say, however, that something happened to Ian Murdock that really upset him.

whitealice, I don't have a clue what this guy's life has been like as far as past tramatic events, but I have watched recreational drugs react this badly-and even worse- in young people I know who have some sort of unpleasantness in their early lives.
I've also known a couple of people why 'tripped out', never to be the same after just one experience with psychotropic drugs.

Drugs- legal or not- may not even be a factor in what happened to him; it's just what came to mind based on what is known so far.

I wonder if there was some profound professional failure he never got over. Money isn't always someone's career end-goal. Maybe he had been working on something that was some epic idea, but may have been an epic faceplant in application instead. Or maybe someone stole his thunder, so to speak, and ran with an idea he initiated & he took it very personally & then some. My brother is in IT, he mentioned a long time ago that some people he worked with were very mentally delicate under the stresses & it wouldn't take much to break them.

I understand some areas of the tech industry can be very cutthroat, and very backstabby. That kind of career atmosphere can't be good for the psyche in the long-term. Keeping that in mind,I do fully understand how some in it end up snorting coke to get through the days, dropping acid to unwind, etc. It's not any excuse, but I can see how they'd see it as a method of trying to keep their sanity. Maybe that's what this guy did, and it backfired on him with delusions or paranoia, badly.

The thing about this line of reasoning is that he was, in fact, arrested, jailed and treated at a hospital.

www.zdnet.com/article/debian-linux-founder-ian-murdock-dies-at-42-cause-unknown/

Hard to say what in the tweets struck him as being authentically Murdock.  Vaughan-Nichols also repeated that Murdock's cause/circumstances of death are unknown 3 times.  That's a known writing technique actually, believe it or not, that is deliberately done when one wants to emphasize a point.  Three times a charm, right?  He also places a lot of emphasis on the quotes from Murdock warning people of police brutality.  I think that Vaughan-Nichols is actually rather troubled by the whole thing.

It'll be interesting to see what the community dredges up though there seems to be some infighting on whether it's "right or not", it seems to be happening anyways.  Just running a search for the individual who was taunting him on twitter showed, by return ranking, that that person had already had every connectable bit of internet linked back to them.  That's just web searches.  There's already been a FOIA request as well and discourse on Hacker News about what is needed to be located.   Many of these guys knew Murdock.  If anything untoward is found, it'll probably not go well given who Murdock was to many of these guys.  A friend of mine, who is a tech guru associated with another Linux based o/s, is deeply troubled by the whole affair.  He's told me of his own experiences living in Silicon Valley with the PD there and to be quite blunt, he's terrified of them.   This kind of experience and Murdock's pledge to fight police brutality is precisely what is motivating a whole lot of "gurus" and hackers to dig.