[humorix] Last Independent Linux Site Sold To Commercial Interests

[James Baughn <jbaughn@ldd.net>]

Last Independent Linux Site Sold To Commercial Interests
Bernhard Rosenkraenzer, bero@redhat.de
July 4, 2000

During the past year, the founders of Linux websites have
been getting rich by selling their sites to commercial
interests stuffed with Venture Capital. We here at Humorix
were the last holdout -- until today. VA Linux, hot on the
heels of acquiring the last two-letter Top Level Domain,
announced today that they had acquired Humorix, the last
independent Linux portal site, for an undisclosed sum of
US$10,000,000,000 (oh, that was supposed to be
undisclosed... Oops!).

Humorix is to be merged with Slashdot to create a new
mega-portal site, called Slashdotix.  With a motto of "Fake
news for nerds. Stuff that would matter if it were true",
the new site is the logical continuation of Slashdot. As
part of the merger, Jon Katz will be fired in favor of Jon
Splatz and Roblimo will be demoted to limosine driver for
James Taco.

Said one head honcho at VA Linux, "Slashdot has always been
accused of running unconfirmed rumors or obviously false
articles. With this strategic partnership, that's no longer
a problem, because everything will be fake. Of course, some
idiot will probably start posting 'Hey, this article is
true!' comments, but those can be safely ignored."

The community doesn't seem all that thrilled about the
merger. Said Mr. A. Coward, Slashdot's most famous and
active poster, while pouring a bowl of hot grits down his
pants,  "Darn! Now I won't be able to score first posts
stating that the article needs better research!  What am I
going to do now?"  He then added coyly, "Oh, by the way,
First Interview!"

During the last month, VA Linux has acquired two dozen
remaining Linux sites ranging from
YetAnotherLinuxNewbieSite.org to PenguinPorn.com to even
the Linux Kernel Mailing List itself. They also host a huge
percentage of Open Source projects on SourceForge. "Who
says you can't make money from Open Source?" asked one VA
Linux executive. "Let's just hope a killer backhoe doesn't
take out our SourceForge Net backbone connection, or else
free software development would halt..."

Other IPO-rich companies such as Internet.com and Red Hat
have been busy snatching up Linux properties as well. "Back
in the bad old days," explained one industry observer,
"everybody wanted to launch a start-up and then sell out to
Microsoft for beaucoup bucks. Now the hot strategy is to
create a Linux website and sell-out to VA Linux or
Internet.com within a month. Man I love this new economy!"

-
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