Ian Jackson (computer programmer)

Not to be confused with Ian Murdock.

For the basketball player, see Ian Jackson (basketball).

Ian Jackson is a longtime free software author and Debian developer. Jackson wrote dpkg^[1][2][3] (replacing a more primitive Perl tool with the same name), SAUCE (Software Against Unsolicited Commercial Email), userv and debbugs. He used to maintain the Linux FAQ. He runs chiark.greenend.org.uk, a Linux system which is home to PuTTY among other things.

As of October 2021, he works for the Tor Project.^[4][5] He has previously worked for Citrix,^[6][7] Canonical,^[8] and nCipher.^[9]

Jackson became Debian Project Leader in January 1998, and Wichert Akkerman took his place in 1999.^[10][2] Debian GNU/Linux 2.0 (hamm) was released during his term. During that time he was also a vice-president and then president of Software in the Public Interest in 1998 and 1999.

Jackson received a PhD in Computer Science from Cambridge University in 1998. His PhD thesis was entitled Who goes here ? Confidentiality of location through anonymity.^[11]

Jackson was a member of the Debian Technical Committee^[12] until November 2014 when he resigned^[13] as a result of controversies around the proposed use of systemd in Debian.^[14]

Additional works

• authbind (1998), an open-source system utility