Ubuntu, Debian, RedHat, SUSE, others announce merge
In what appears to be an event of major historical significance in the development of Linux, a committee consisting of big names in the industry such as Mr. Linux himself, Linus Torvalds, Mark Shuttleworth (from Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu), James M. Whitehurst (CEO of Red Hat Inc.), Matthias G. Eckermann (Senior Product Manager for SUSE® Linux Enterprise from Novell’), Stefano Zacchiroli (Debian Project Leader), core committers from the Fedora project, and many, many others, held an improvised press conference last night at the Open Source Symposium 2011 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
Improvised press conference
The press conference was held at 3:00 AM at the Thalia Lounge, where many symposium participants went to socialize and have some drinks after the daytime keynotes and workshops. Journalists were invited to join using Twitter, and despite the unorthodox timing and short notice, many journalists and Linux enthousiasts showed up. As it was quite late, a majority of the committee members was not sober, fully clothed, or otherwise looking representative, so attending members of the press were told to not take any photos or videos.
One big happy family
Linux bobos and developers feel like one big happy family but rather remain anonymous
After the committee finally got some tables together and cleared out the empty bottles, James Whitehurst made the following announcement. “Thank you all for coming. We have some really great news for everyone that loves Linux.”, he started. He struggled for a moment to suppress a burp, then continued, “It’s about time we got over this whole embarrassing situation with all those different distributions. That’s just bullshit. Therefore, we have decided tonight we’re gonna merge everything into one big happy Linux. We’re calling it UnifiedLinux!”. After this, the entire committee and many developers in the room loudly cheered, some started dancing around for a bit, others embraced each other. “Yeah! That’s the spirit!”, exclaimed Mark Shuttleworth, swinging his tie over his head.”
Linus Torvalds: Work together, stop whining
It took no less than 15 minutes before things calmed down a bit, then Linus Torvalds took the microphone. “This is the best thing to happen to Linux in a long time. We should all be working together, and stop whining about… uhm….”. He seemed to have lost his train of thought for a moment, but after quick shot of tequila he went on to say, “We should just stop whining about development bicycles, luggage management and that XXX gooey stuff”. Seeing as that Linus was about to throw up, Matthias Eckermann quickly took over at this point. “He means, development cycles, package management, and X Window GUIs, of course. That’s all gonna go too, we’re just gonna have one kind. Guys, what’s the name of that? Oh, right, yes, it will be called Gnu-Be-Doo!”, said Matthias, and started laughing hysterically.
The advent of UnifiedLinux
Apparently, UnifiedLinux will have weekly releases, packages will be called “meatballs” and managed with a new tool called Miss Piggy, but there will also be vegetarian packages, “Soyballs”. The GUI will be all purple, all shell commands will be renamed to start with a Z, and the entire system will run on a single account, the “beermeister”. Everyone will can freely contribute kernel modules, which will be converted to BASIC to allow programming while under the influence.
At 4:13 AM, the press conference was brutally ended by local law enforcement officers after complains from neighboring residents, but the committee was able to issue a final statement before being dragged into police vehicles, saying that “UnifiedLinux [burp] rulezzz!”.
