Let’s go back to 1993. Bill Clinton is president, Jurassic Park is selling out movie tickets, UB40’s redo of Can’t Help Falling in Love is number one on the Billboard charts, and Purdue college student Ian Murdock announces the creation of a new distribution called the Debian Linux Release on the comp.os.linux.development Usenet newsgroup.

Murdock wrote: “This is a release that I have put together basically from scratch; in other words, I didn’t simply make some changes to SLS [Softlanding Linux System] and call it a new release. I was inspired to put together this release after running SLS and generally being dissatisfied with much of it, and after much altering of SLS, I decided that it would be easier to start from scratch.” 

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The name Debian was a portmanteau of Murdock’s then-girlfriend’s name, Debra, and his own first name. And each release — which, today, has reached Debian 12, Bookworm — is named after a Toy Story character. 

It was a different time. There was no Git, Red Hat Linux didn’t exist, and IBM didn’t support Linux yet. Linux was still very much a hobbyist operating system. It was used by students and computer scientists more than anyone else. I’d been using the OS since Linux 0.11 in November 1991, but then I’d been a Unix user for over a decade by then. 

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Murdock knew not everyone could ftp, compile, build, and boot Linux from source code. He believed the first distros, especially SLS, weren’t good enough. So he started building Debian as a sleeker Linux distro, which you could install without needing “to be babysat … and let the machine install the release while you do more interesting things.” In short, he said: “Debian will make Linux easier for users who don’t have access to the Internet.”

Debian was the first Linux distro that made easy installation and deployment a priority. At the same time, when it began, Debian was the only distribution that was open for every developer and user to contribute their work. Today, it’s still easily the most important community Linux distribution. All the other distros, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Ubuntu, and SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE), and their community branches, such as Fedora and openSUSE, are either directly or indirectly tied to commercial companies. 

As tech-savvy blogger Cory Doctorow wrote after Murdock’s much-too-early death in 2015: “The Debian project fundamentally shifted the way free/open code got made by fusing an insistence on engineering excellence with a public declaration of the ethical nature of doing free software development.”

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People who knew Murdock well agreed. Bruce Perens, creator of the Debian Social Contract and the Debian Free Software Guidelines, which laid out