Debian founder joins Sun
Ian Murdock, chief technology officer of the Linux Foundation and the creator of the Debian Linux distribution, this month began his new job as chief operating platforms officer at Sun Microsystems Inc. Murdock made the announcement on his blog. “It is with regrets that I leave the Linux Foundation, but if you haven’t figured out already, Sun is a company I’ve always loved,” Murdock wrote. Murdock said his duties as chief operating platforms officer are as yet undefined, but Simon Phipps, the chief open source officer at Sun, wrote on his blog that Murdock will be “responsible for building a new strategy to evolve both Sun’s Solaris and GNU/Linux strategies.”
New leader for Internet group
The Internet Architecture Board has a new leader: Olaf Kolkman, a DNS expert from the Netherlands. The IAB provides overall architectural direction and oversight to the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet’s premier standards body. The IAB also serves as the technology advisory group for the Internet Society, a professional organization that provides advice on Internet policy. Kolkman took the reins at the IAB at a meeting this month.
‘Wiki’ finally legit, says OED
Six years after Wikipedia.org debuted, editors at the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) have finally deigned to add the word “wiki” to the OED’s online version.
The term joined a handful of other technology-related entries added to the online OED as part of the dictionary’s quarterly update. Also added: “Infobahn,” “malware,” “undelete” and “virtualize.” “[Wiki] joins a small but distinguished group of words which are directly or ultimately borrowings into English from Hawaiian,” noted Graeme Diamond, OED’s principal editor of new words, on the dictionary’s site. He also laid claim to a connection between the OED and the new entry. “It has been suggested that in some ways the OED itself resembles a wiki: Its long tradition of working on collaborative principles means it has welcomed the contribution of information and quotation evidence from the public for over 150 years,” Diamond said.