Torvalds talks like a pirate

Linux creator Linus Torvalds on Thursday signaled his enjoyment of the annual "Talk Like a Pirate Day" festivities, using the nautical lexicon to launch an update to the kernel at the heart of the open-source operating system.

"Ahoy! She's good to go, hoist anchor!" wrote Torvalds in a public announcement on Wednesday of version 2.6.18 of the Linux kernel. "Here's some real booty for all you landlubbers," he continued.

"There's not too many changes, with t'bulk of the patch bein' defconfig updates, but the shortlog at the aft of this here e-mail describes the details if you care, you scurvy dogs," he wrote.

Signing his missive "Linus 'but you can call me Cap'n,'" Torvalds went on to assign watery nicknames to a number of well-known kernel developers, as follows:

Al "bilge rat" Viro
"Cap'n" Andrew Morton
Paul "peg leg" Mackerras

He also sprinkled pirate vernacular throughout the e-mail detailing the kernel update, for example:

[MTD] NAND: keelhaul marooned URL in Kconfig
e1000: fix bilge-sucking TX timout hang regression for 82542rev3
[ARM] 3793/1: S3C2412: fix barnacles in wrong serial info struct
[Shiver me timbers] EXT2: Remove superblock lock contention in ext2_statfs
Davy Jones: Didn't do anything, the scurvy lad. Ahoy!
Well blow me down, if he didn't fix 'make headers_check' on ia64
[JFFS2][SUMMARY] Fix a bilge-suckin' summary collectin' bug. Arrr!
genirq: Fix the typo in IRQ resend smartly, cabin boy!

International Talk Like a Pirate Day is on Sept. 19. The event encourages people world-wide to use pirate terms in their everyday speech.

Renai LeMay reported for ZDNet Australia from Sydney.

[Sparky672]

People

There's far more substance in articles found in People Magazine.

[ddesy]

And?

A little entertainment surely doesn't hurt.

[Seaspray0]

I wonder if...

will the video be as good as Bill Gates running like a girl while comming onstage for one of his meetings?

[clsgis]

Torvalds enjoys life

I had the privilege of watching Linus describe how SMP was going to work, at a packed meeting of the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group, and met him briefly afterwards. Years later caught his interview with Charlie Rose. You can tell he's enjoying himself, all the time.

The SMP talk was remarkable. The audience was diverse, from high school kids to IT suits, lots of technical people, and the reporter from the _Mercury_. He didn't talk down to anybody, but managed to make SMP so simple anybody could understand it.

It's a lot of why Linux succeeded and you never heard of most of the other free unixes. He makes everybody around him feel worthwhile. You want to be part of that project.