LinuxWorld Laughs

Not really sure why the Linux world would find the Bill and Melinda Foundation giving a donation to charity humorous, but it seems to stem from the mess surround the past with Joel Klein. He was tied up with MS over the whole anti-trust bit and is now on the receiving end of the donation from that same company who he once said was a monopoly. Crazy days, folks!

“Change is good,” proclaimed the banner above the Hewlett-Packard booth at LinuxWorld in Beantown. In the wake of Carly Fiorina’s ouster from HP, the bouncy slogan wreaked of irony. The dark humor was accented by the “Nothing but Blue Skies Ahead” musical loop that serenaded Spence and other passersby.
Kattoon: February 21, 2005

Interrupting the melody, a Palo Alto pal whispered in the Maven of Murmur’s ear a joke he’d heard had been circulating at some HP offices after Fiorina’s exit. She somehow finds herself at the gates of heaven, and an angel tells her to go down the corridor and enter the first door on the right. Opening the door, the superstar CEO sees tormented souls writhing in flames and runs back to the angel to complain. “Oh, yeah,” says the angel, “I forgot to tell you … we merged.”

The Mouser was amused that the très chic haberdasheries surrounding the Hynes Veterans Memorial Convention Center had “Welcome LinuxWorld Attendees” signs in their windows. “I think the average open-source enthusiast is more interested in the food court than in a Hugo Boss blazer,” cackled the Kitty.

Over cocktails, the Katt and his crony listened to one pro-Solaris geek’s rant on Linux kernel developers working under the GPL: “They’re like the Borg; they assimilate.” Noting that much of what is good in Linux was created by FreeBSD developers, the Sun worshipper claimed that Sun’s CDDL license won’t allow such cherry-picking. The most interesting tidbit on the legal front came from the ever-verbose Bruce—everyone’s-second-choice-after-Linus Torvalds-as-a-speaker—Perens, the open-source expert and author, who speculated Microsoft may be gearing up for “the defining Linux patent-infringement case” and claimed such an attack could be carried out through proxies like Nathan Myhrvold’s IP-focused venture capital company Intellectual Ventures.