While I was away on vacation a couple of weeks ago, the Fake Linus Torvalds were unleashed upon the Twitter community.
Four–count ’em–four prominent members of the information technology community are sharing their inner ids with the rest of the microblogging world on Twitter and Identi.ca.
To say there is a slight lack of inhibition on their part is perhaps a bit of an understatement. The recent tweet from flt#2 about the tattoo on Bill Gates’ left buttock was a pretty big ring on the clue phone.
The others are no slouches in the razzing department, either. Take flt#1‘s first post: “Why do Debian people annoy me so much? Yet they do.” Even Twitter itself is not immune as a target, as this tweet from flt#3 demonstrates: “Is Twitter running on Minix or something? Why the hell is it down so often?”
Of course, it’s not all about fight club. There’s some positive services coming out of this, like this tweet from flt#4: “If you re-tweet this, I will fix a kernel bug for you. Promise.”
When this Twitter takeover was announced, Jim Zemlin also noted that a couple of weeks before LinuxCon, you would be able to vote on who your favorite FLT is.
That voting system is up on running here on Linux.com now, and I invite you to check out the tweets of these four imposters and choose your favorite pseudo-Torvalds. The winner of the most votes will receive the coveted Silver Shaker when we announce the identities of all the tweeters at LinuxCon.
I’d vote myself, but I know who they are. Do you have any guesses?
