Home opinion-and-analysis Open Sauce Now, you too can shave Bdale's beard

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One of the happenings at the 10th Australian national Linux conference that attracted the most attention was the shaving of Bdale Garbee's beard by Linus Torvalds.

It came to pass after an incredibly complicated auction at a dinner, the auction being organised to raise funds for research into saving the Tasmanian Devil.

Obviously, not everyone can shave the real Bdale . And given the background to his sporting a beard, it is unlikely that he will ever agree to do it again.

But then there is always the virtual world where one can enjoy oneself.

When FOSS developers encounter good software that the masses cannot use, they tend to knock up open source equivalents.

Much in this spirit, one clever game developer has come up with a game where you can shave Bdale's beard.

Given that the great shave of the century took place on January 23, Andrew Bennett has worked at a pretty quick pace to come up with the Flash game Shaving Bdale.

This again is the way FOSS works - things happen at a pretty fast pace.

Bennett's effort earned an honourable mention in the game development competition at the Gaming Mini-Conference which was part of the conference.

He didn't manage to provide shears but there's a pretty handy trimmer which one can use. It works and works well!

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Sam Varghese

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A professional journalist with decades of experience, Sam for nine years used DOS and then Windows, which led him to start experimenting with GNU/Linux in 1998. Since then he has written widely about the use of both free and open source software, and the people behind the code. His personal blog is titled Irregular Expression.

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