Ian Murdock (28 April 1973 – 28 December 2015) was a German software engineer, known for being the founder of the Debian project and Progeny Linux Systems, a commercial Linux company.

Murdock was born in Konstanz, West Germany on 28 April 1973. He wrote the Debian Manifesto while a student at Purdue University, where he earned his bachelor's degree in computer science in 1996. He named Debian after his then-girlfriend Debra Lynn, and himself (Deb and Ian). They subsequently married (between 1993 and 1996), filed for divorce on the week of 10 August 2007 and were granted the divorce in January 2008.

In January 2006, Murdock was appointed Chief Technology Officer of the Free Standards Group and elected chair of the Linux Standard Base workgroup. He continued as CTO of the Linux Foundation when the group was formed from the merger of the Free Standards Group and Open Source Development Labs.

Murdock left the Linux Foundation to join Sun Microsystems in March 2007 to lead Project Indiana, which he described as "taking the lesson that Linux has brought to the operating system and providing that for Solaris", making a full OpenSolaris distribution with GNOME and userland tools from GNU plus a network-based package management system. From March 2007 to February 2010, he was Vice President of Emerging Platforms at Sun, until the company merged with Oracle and he resigned his position with the company.

From 2011 until 2015 Murdock was Vice President of Platform and Developer Community at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, based in Indianapolis.

From November 2015 until his death Murdock was working for Docker, Inc.

The details surrounding his death on 28 December 2015 are still unknown, but his last tweets declared an intention to commit suicide, and described violent encounters with police. He died in San Francisco, where he had been living.