To "Tuttle"

Oh, this is priceless.

This comment (“When is a Republican Not a Bully? Never”) in an open thread at DailyKos pointed me to what is apparently now a notorious story amongst Linux folks. I highly recommend it for chuckle value. Make sure you follow all the links listed there, particularly the ones to the articles at The Register. Their author, a certain "Ashlee Vance in Mountain View", has the kind of pen that really leaves a mark. The text of the actual emails is also available.

The short version of the story is that Jerry Taylor, the city manager of a microscopic Oklahoma town known as "Tuttle" threatened the developers of an the open-source OS that his web servers ran on, called "CentOS" with reporting them to the FBI for hacking, when in fact the problem was due to a boo-boo by the city's ISP. The CentOS authors tried to explain to him that there was no way their OS could have been installed on their machines by hackery, to no avail. (Unsurprisingly, the ISP's no doubt outsourced and below-minimum-wage support staff disavowed all knowledge of the mistake and of the OS they used.)

Then, after the problem was fixed, he compounded the insult by deriding Linux developers as "a bunch of freaks out there that don't have anything better to do," and dismissed the Open Source movement with: "(CentOS is) a free operating system that this guy gives away, which tells you how much time he's got on his hands."

Unsurprisingly, this town voted for Bush by a margin of 70% to less than 30%.

Categories: politics, republicans, wingnuts, idiocy, humour, humor, funny, geek, geeky, linux, os, opensource, software, byjjmg