I find it amazing how the uninformed can relate history to the informed and believe it to be the truth

My sister had a Moose once....

Mynd you, møøse bites Kan be pretty nasti...

Great!
Linus, You just gave them what you deserved!
Best Wishes.

Who says Santa is not from Finland? Have You met him? Are You reliable?

DOES ANYONE REALIZE WHAT HE JUST SAID ABOUT NEWTS?!?!!

Linus claims that Santa Claus is from Finland, that is not true! So Linus is probably not telling the truth about his claimed invention of Linux either.

For such a childish accusation a story with Santa and Fairies is the perfect answer. They cannot understand nothing at higher level anyway.

I just wonder if the stork would have been more appropriate.

Well done Linus! It shows that you have kids and know how to talk to one!

> Oh.. let's just agree that santa claus is Skandinavian, ok boys?

No, Santa was born in Finland and is still living there happily, don't you even dare to question that fact.

So the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus have stolen source code from SCO? If this is true, how trustworthy is Santa Clause. He says he only give x-mas presents to fair children. But he is unfair. How can this be? And the Tooth Fairy! Actually he did not exchange the teeth, she just stole all of it! In this case I can no more believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. I demand that we search for other people who do this two jobs. Maybe the easter rabbit can do it? I mean he also has to work only once a year. Its no problem for him to do the christman job. If Linux is a lie, at least Christmas shouldn't be one.
I will make a petition for the matter. Who wants to support me? Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy must be stopped!

REALLY good linus ;)

i hope you're right and the page has been hacked. or they are getting payed a lot to write this. but this is not the place to discuss conspiracies.

best wishes. chris

Hi, this is Kenneth. I am a greedy man and M$ has offered a good price. Had no choise.

Sorry to disappoint you fokes.

Exactly. The original "study" is correct in that Linus didn't invent very much at all, but they fail to acknowledge that this is completely beside the point. Linus constructed the Linux kernel from scratch. Like all people who progress humanity, he only did so by standing on the shoulders of giants.

For what it's worth, Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile, either, but even decades later, we'd hardly accuse him of theft. Moreover, he built cars that existing drivers would already know how to drive by making them look like the cars that were there beforehand.

The situation is similar to what Darrel Huff in How to Lie with Statistics refers to as "the semi-attached figure". If you can't prove something, prove something else and pretend they're the same. So, for example, you say your toilet cleaner "kills germs faster" and strongly imply, though never right-out say, that this has something to do with your family's health even though it probably doesn't.

Worst of all, this kind of thinking completely ignores how human progress happens. It's the myth of the genius all over again. Progress happens on the fringes of what we already have. When you get down to it, every work is a derivative work (except in the legal sense of the term). Einstein couldn't have come up with the idea of relativity without centuries of work by smart physicists and mathematicians before him.

Hell, Unix is just a castrated version of Multics, right?

This discussion is ridiculous. Santa Claus lives in Greenland, of course.

The de Tocqueville people say they are going to quote people like Dennis Ritchie and Richard Stallman. What those Ritchie and Stallman almost certainly told them is that Linux is a faithful re-implementation of Unix and thus not highly original or ground-breaking; also that Linus is often given credit for functionality that is not in the kernel (you know, the whole GNU/Linux flamewar). And all that's true. The problem is that the de Tocqueville people don't get that this is perfectly legitimate; the Posix standard that specifies the behavior of Unix-like systems is a public standard, the code is all original and there were no patents in the way.

Good! At last some proper justice meted out of this Linus wannabe programmer poser guy. The de Tocqueville Institute is right to expose such frauds, being funded my Microsoft who, as we all know, is the true father of MS-DOS...

Linus would have a pretty good libel case.

Damn, Linus has become newt lover and Santa Open Source hero, tooth fairy still has a slight problem with a role of father.

And AdTI?? Well, we have to be thankfull, without them (and M$) this wonderful joke wouldn't get out.

So... Thanks AdTI and thanks to our dear sponsor M$, hope they will start to be more aggressive in comedian bussines. It suits them more than computer bussiness

I just wonder how expensive this joke was for M$, more or less than LOTR?

all hail Linus. It's a good job that he has a sense of humour.

Is there anyone who have noticed that AdTI´s site is down??
Hehe ;)

>> Linus commented on 17 May 2004:
>> How did you know?!?

Oh, well, you know. We scandinavian geeks know these things. Our geek underground secret agency here in Copenhagen has been keeping an eye on you since you were born... *scene cuts out and X-Files tune begin playing*

^_^

Hehe, adti site is down... wonder why?!

Oh.. let's just agree that santa claus is Skandinavian, ok boys?

I Knew It!!!! I knew that Santa Claus an the Tooth Fairy were real!!! YES YES YES!!! I knew it!!!

It's pretty cool to find out that some of these supposedly make-believe creatures have been sighted, and doing real work at that. Now, has anyone seen those MIT rocket scientists?

Quote:
"No wait, Linus. We should tell them the real truth. Might as well now that all this is happening.

It was Bill Gates...

....

There, I said it... now we all know the truth."

How did you know?!?

Linus & The Iraqi Information Minister now share the same lack of credibility...So I suppose that Linus' testimony in the upcoming SCO, IBM, Novell, Auto Zone. Daimler-Chrysler suits will be viewed as statements made by a TOTAL IMPOSTER !!! Why bother to even show up? ...and we were counting on your "expert" testimony!

I don't buy it. We all know that Al Gore created Linux.
Well, at least Al knows...

>>>> Santa Claus was definitely Swedish
>>Santa Claus live in the North Pole, North Pole is in Canada!

Santa Claus is Canadian? Well, then, it's no wonder he dresses like a Mountie...

Now that is has been unveiled the original creator of the Linux Kernel, (no other than me), i want:

*Changes in the Copyright file to take credit of all the work.

* 4,000,000,000 US$, or this year lots of children aren't going to have their ThinkGeek presents.

Muhahahhahaha.

All your code are belong to Santa.

PS: i also own the Unix rights. Muhahaha.

:-)

Warning: off-topic
> Santa is from Finland|Norway|Sweden|Canada
Wrong again. Santa Claus is a lot more international.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Claus#Origins

You can add to that list of countries: Turkey, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Spain (ask any dutch child; Sinterklaas a.k.a. Sint Nicolaas a.k.a. Saint Nicholas a.k.a. Santa Claus lives in Spain) and the United States of America.

Terry Pratchett's Discworld books report a bit more information on the Tooth Fairy than what they tell us as kids. Faeries are similar to elves - nasty, brutish, and short. They steal your sheep, sour your milk, enchant your children, and generally need to be placated if you want to avoid trouble. So when one of them sneaks around at night pulling out kids' teeth, we're supposed to think that that's a _good_ thing? Not...

Funny that for all their railing against FOSS software,
www.adti.net is served from FreeBSD [netcraft].
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=www.adti.net

I would think for all their MS schilling, they would go with their own recommendations.

Linus Torvalds must have been a VERY good boy that year. ;)

>> Santa Claus was definitely Swedish

Santa Claus live in the North Pole, North Pole is in Canada!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_pole

No wait, Linus. We should tell them the real truth. Might as well now that all this is happening.

It was Bill Gates...

Yes... it was Bill Gates who invented Linux... its true. You see, one night young Bill was on a drugs & drink-fueled bender and had a small quarrel with Steve Balmer about their operating system. Something about a monolithic or micro kernel... or something. After that, everything was a blur. However, the next morning he woke up drooling over a keyboard and as he looked up to see what was on screen, there it was... to Bill's horror was the familiar blinking of the cursor... and a bash prompt.

Bill Gates shrieked, terrified of his own creation. "It's a monster!", he moaned as he realized the economic disaster it would be to actually release a stable, powerful and viable operating system. How would he make his billions through bad support, ridiculous licencing schemes, untimely and often irrelevant patches and slight incremental updates every 3 or 4 years... when when... Bill shuddered at the thought... when it actually works?! Stevie will hate me, he thought to himself ashamedly.

Fortunately for Bill or for Linus (or both actually), he happened to be walking on the pavement alongside that of Bill's hotel room window where he was staying in Helsinki at the right time. Bill's head popped out from his window and he shouted to Linus from above, "Hey you! How would you like some source code to the most awesome operating system ever?" "Operating system?", replied Linus. "Yes!" This struck Linus as being the oddest thing ever, but ok, whatever. "Whats your name, stranger?" retorted Bill. "Linus." "What? Linux?" "No..." Oh nevermind, thought Linus. And with that fell a floppy disk from the window. On it was written, "Linux".

There, I said it... now we all know the truth.

>> Fact, and this is undisputable, is that Santa Claus is from *Norway*.

Wrong again. Santa Claus is undoubtedly from Sweden. You Norwegians love taking all the credit for everything Scandinavian, like lefse and lutefisk (well, you can take the credit for lutefisk), but no more!

Santa Claus was definitely Swedish.

I am shocked. Not at the fact that Santa and Tooth did the work, that has been kinda obvious for some time... Have you seen some of the comments in the original kernel source?

The shocking part here is Linus' claim that Santa is from Finland. That is a completely bogus claim with no merit whatsoever. A finnish TV program with two "comedians" claimed this many years ago, and more and more people have started to belive it.

Fact, and this is undisputable, is that Santa Claus is from *Norway*.

If you finns wants to have some mythical figures, please go and make up som of your own. Don't steal other countries citizens.

RE: *SLIGHTLY OFF TOPIC BUT VERY FUNNY*

No, the ad company runs a windows server...

I think that is is first time I have seen an ad /.ed rather than a site ;)

[quote]SLIGHTLY OFF TOPIC BUT VERY FUNNY*
um....to the right...the banner ad for syscon...it showed up with a 404 not found error...but they run Windows....on a Linux site?[/quote]

Umm the error is not from the linuxworld webserver, its from the sys-con boxen. Look closer.

Something I ripped from groklaw:
-----------------------------------------
Parody of press release
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 17 2004 @ 08:02 AM EDT

I say "parody" but the only valid interpretation for the original PR[1] seems to apply to Windows just as well.

[1]- That being that Linus re-implemented a lot of very good ideas, and that he and others have also come up with useful ways to solve other problems not addressed in the classic implementation of Unix.

Microsoft claim to "invent" Windows probably false, says new study

Thu Apr 1, 12:00 AM

Redmond, WA (SatirePress) Apr 1, 2004 - Popular but controversial "proprietary" computer software, often written on a for-profit basis, is often taken or adapted without permission from material owned by other companies and individuals, a study by the Biased Jokers Institution finds. Among other points, the study directly challenges Microsoft Corporation's claim to be the inventor of Windows. In one of the few extensive studies on the source of proprietary code, Curly Joker, president of BJI, traces the proprietary software movement over its less-than-three decade life -- from its ranty beginning, through its evolution to a club that encourages convicted corporations to build up $50 billion war chests. Joker's account is based on extensive interviews with more than two leading technologists including Bill Gates, Werner von Braun, and more who have been interviewed by third parties.

"The report," according to Unbiased Mole, a Biased Jokers senior fellow, "raises important questions that all developers and users of proprietary software must face. While you cannot group all proprietary software and companies together; many are rigorous and respectful of the unspecified intellectual property rights, while others mismatch semicolons and commas. Go figure."

Joker suggests the invention of VMS is an integral part of the Windows story commenting, "It is clear that even narrow interest in the VMS operating system made VMS one of the premier sources of Windows NT design ideas because Microsoft hired a bunch of ex-VMS engineers." Joker writes, "Over the years, many have envied the startling and pervasive success of Windows. For almost ten years, governments have tried and failed to successfully make Microsoft comply with anti-trust laws and couldn't. To this day, we have a serious open market problem in computers because people have chosen to scrupulously exploit monopoly positions." [I apologize for the poor grammar - the original was so.]

Joker's study is part of a book he is writing in hopes to bag a cushy expert witness gig during future anti-trust trials. Excerpts from the book cannot be redistributed; all your copyright are belong to us.

*SLIGHTLY OFF TOPIC BUT VERY FUNNY*
um....to the right...the banner ad for syscon...it showed up with a 404 not found error...but they run Windows....on a Linux site?

????

Wait!!! Does Mrs. Claus know about Mr. Claus and the Tooth Fairy?

Seriously though, only the uninformed would believe AdTI's unsupported, biased and distorted story.

And is it so, now, that Santa will skip the naughty boyz from adTI & SCO this year? I would think he should..

linus CraX0rs me up! Really for coming from a norse country his sense of humor is brilliant. Must be all that time living in cali. The sad thing is.. it just shows that for m$fT spending money(see also, baystar,sco, adti)for fud is just another way for billy G to hold his market position. Its sick , sad, pathetic, and wrong...Oh did i for get to mention his mistresses laura Didiot and rob enderle?..M$ft 0wns J00!

i also have it on highest authority that the same characters are resposible for unix as well and they decided to create linux due to the mess with everyone claiming ownership of unix! but since the mess with sco they have come out of the closet and are p1ssed!!!! They have legal council and are going to sue.......they just cant decide where to start! I suggested someone with deep pockets and they thought that was a fantastic idea....they came up with IBM! I guess if you are looking to sue then you are looking for deep pockets ! Couldnt be the reason why sco picked them as well could it? nah.... certainly not..... yea, i am just rambling and going nowhere with this but hey you read it!

Given that we can no longer blame Linus for Linux, I think we should begin looking for the OS obsessed, open source supporting dude who handed the world over to all the IP theives and Terrorists the AdTI warned us about.(Name almost cirtainly begins Linu- something...)

As a matter of fact, I have it on reliable evidence that Vaanamoinen (generally spelled Vainamoinen) did _not_ write Linux, but instead it was generated by a mythical army of monkeys with typewriters taking dictation from a committee of Finnish Gypsy tea-leaf readers who had been smoking nasty-weed and suffering from insomnia. There is no other possible explanation, unless you credit the rumors, generally considered no unfounded, that Linux was written by hyper-dimensional refugees from the planet Trafalmador who had been transmorgrified by their own delusions in to 20th Century hackers who with the ability to use Vulcan mind-meld technologies to influence human destiny.

Nice to see that Linus is treating these idiots with the contempt they deserve. More power to you!

Linus is being devious, the code bears
the marks of having been written by
Vaanamoinen.