Identities of Fake Linus Torvalds Revealed

Poor Linus Torvalds. All that kernel work and what does he get in return? Four random people running around the Internet impersonating him for nearly a month. In attempts to throw people off the track, the Fake Linus Torvaldses (Torvaldii?) used Twitter and identi.ca to talk about everything from recoding the Linux kernel in Ruby to tattoo removal. Some bloggers even attempted to find out which people were behind the masks by peppering the FLTs with questions designed to draw out their true identities.

LinuxCon got underway today and shortly after the real Linus Torvalds concluded a panel on the Linux kernel, the impostors were revealed. Event organizers also announced which FLT garnered the most votes for crowd favorite.

And the winner is:

FLT#2 - Cnet Blogger, Matt Asay

The other three well-known community members in on the gag were:

* FLT#1 - Columnist & The Fake Steve Jobs, Dan Lyons

* FLT#3 - OpenSUSE Community Manager, Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier

* FLT#4 - Ubuntu Community Manager, Jono Bacon

The Linux Foundation did a terrific job generating buzz around the conference with this fun little running gag. Congratulations to Matt and all the FLTs. It'll be fun to see how The Linux Foundation tops this next year.