Sun Microsystems said Monday it has hired Ian Murdock, the lead developer of the Debian Linux project, and will put him to work tomorrow as chief operating platforms officer. Exactly what that newly created post is no one is sure.

Which operating system, Solaris 10 or Linux, is at the center of the platform? The plural in the title may mean Sun is finally going to come up with a Linux strategy to complement its apparently successful release of Solaris 10 last year as open source code.

Sun's executive team is mum on exactly what that work will be. Sun's open source strategy guy, Simon Phipps, says in a blog that Murdock "is responsible for building a new strategy to evolve both Sun's Solaris and Gnu/Linux strategies. The appointment is both at the same time brilliant and controversial, but is the next logical step, as far as I am concerned."

Murdock is the founder of Progeny Linux Systems, a Debian Linux distributor and supporter of Linux built with Red Hat Package Management modules, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In 2002, Progency announced it would support a Linux platform, but since then, Red Hat and Novell SUSE Linux have built out supporting open source software platforms rather than Progeny.

A native of Konstanz, Germany, Murdock graduated from Purdue University with a degree in computer science. Progency was based in Indianapolis. He wrote the Debian Manifesto in 1993 while at student at Purdue and served as CTO of The Linux Foundation before assuming the Sun position.