No Formal Wear, No Nuns, No Chilly Willy

"Couldn't I just meet Bobby Knight in a dark alley and grill him about the allegations that he chokes his players and beats up reporters?"

The boss's leer was withering. "You're the only person who's managed to get an interview with that legendarily reclusive bird; I'll give you that. But you've done it once, you'll do it again."

"He's not so much reclusive as just unfriendly," I muttered on my way out the door.

Tux the Linux spokespenguin waddled across the peanut-strewn floor at Foo Bar, the late-night hangout where I moonlight as relief bartender, and clambered awkwardly onto a stool, knocking over a bowl of pretzels with a fin.

"Formal wear is not required at Foo Bar, sir," I said, hoping it couldn't hurt to lighten the atmosphere.

"Listen, Mac," he answered, grabbing my shirtfront with a distressingly sharp claw, "No formal wear jokes, no nun jokes, no Chilly Willy jokes, no adolescent humor of any kind, got it? Unless you wanna see me walk out of here right now."

Actually, I did want to see him walk out of there right then, looking forward to the sight of his squat little body waddling doorward across the Foo Bar floor like a bowling pin teetering toward the gutter, but I then recalled Erickson's good humor the last time I returned without a story. "No adolescent humor," I conceded. This was going to be a tough assignment.

After a couple of Cuba Libres (a favorite drink of another Foo Bar regular), which he accepted on my recommendation and Erickson's tab, Tux got almost human, and I cranked up my courage and brought up the CNet piece.

"That piece of drivel?" he snapped. He rested his beak on the down of his chest and gave me his trademark menacing glare. "That was just 'he-said, she-said' journalism," he said. "They only liked the Mac OS because they think it's sexy." He suddenly sat up straight. "Is that herring?" I set the dish in front of him.

"Well, sexy counts for something in today's market, doesn't it? Look at BeOS. Intel apparently thinks Be is sexy, given how much it's invested in the company. And Byte dot com's Scot Hacker says that BeOS is a better alternative to Windows than Linux for most users. He also says Be is the better way to go for building Internet appliances."

"Oh, puhleeze. Byte dot com is so over. And Be? That was over a long time ago, even if BeOS is the sexiest operating system around, Linux is hotter than sex."

"Huh?"

"Yeah, Gunnar Isaksson ran the words 'Linux,' 'Windows,' and 'sex' through the AltaVista search engine and got 11,313,520 hits for Linux, 10,755,265 for Windows and 9,589,620 for sex. This is good herring."

"Thanks. So Windows is also more popular than sex, then? And who's Gunnar Isaksson?"

"That's not the point. Two British hackers claimed to have built a web server that runs on potatoes. Guess what operating system they said they used?"

"Sure, I realize that Linux is pioneering important new markets, but..."

"We're taking over, that's what we're doing. We got Alpha Processor turning itself from a chip house into a Linux box vendor, we got companies like Lynx changing their names to sound more like Linux, we got Oracle, the biggest database company, trying to become a Linux vendor in Japan. Everybody wants to be us. We got our own store at Amazon dot com and our own page at DDJ dot com. We got Peter Norton sweeping the floors and Andy Herzfeld painting the walls and France passing laws making us mandatory."

Whether it was the Cuba Libres or the herring, this was going better than I'd expected. "Ever consider cashing in on the Linux boom yourself, Tux? Starting your own company?"

"Kid, would you want to work for me?"

All of a sudden, Erickson didn't look so bad after all. "Not in a million years, Tux. No offense intended."

"None taken. Got any more herring?"

Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
mswaine@swaine.com