LCA2009: Torvalds turns barber for a while

Sam Varghese
Friday, 23 January 2009 09:56

Opinion and Analysis

Before he sat down in the chair, Garbee shared with the audience a series of emails he had exchanged with his wife after he had agreed to the deal.

If anyone thinks he was making too big a deal of it, just bear in mind that the luxuriant growth on his face had not been removed for 27 years. His wife has hardly seen him without his facial growth.

The emails evoked much laughter; his wife asked him to take some photos before the beard was taken off so that there was no chance of him being stopped while leaving the country, said she was doubtful if she would ever let him attend another LCA alone and finally said his friends were a real crazy bunch.

She also suggested that Garbee request, in exchange for his beard, a full body wax by some other attendeee next year - whom she nominated to be kernel hacker Rusty Russell.

Geeks, being geeks, fed a steady stream of messages to Twitter while the shaving was in progress; some of them were clever puns, others only understandable by geeks.

Things like "unmounting /dev/beard", and "killall beard" can only be understood by those with a knowledge of Unix.

But there were also comments like "500 people are sitting quietly watching a man shave himself. the internet is supposed to be surreal, not real life!" and "The source of all power.... gone."

Torvalds cut one hair from Garbee's beard using a set of shears, just for fun. He then used the trimmer until it came to the point where a razor was required.

Garbee then used the razor and the final result a clean-shaven Debian developer with a face as smooth as a baby's rear end.

The whole episode demonstrated exactly why the free and open source software wolrd is different from the rest, why the LCA is what it is and the fact that geeks are really big on social issues - they don't even mind parting with their body hair for a good cause,