I'd like to start this off with a brief introduction. My name is Preston. I program for fun (and sometimes money), and I write for the same reason(s). With all the controversy lately over intellectual property from other companies being in Linux, I thought it would be a good time to clear things up. There is no way that Linus stole SCO code or Minix code to write Linux because, you see, the author of Linux was not Linus Torvalds, but me.

It all started back in late 1990, just after my fifth birthday. Yes, my fifth birthday. You see, I am a genius; but I digress. I was in Europe with my family for a reunion, and all I could think about was finding a terminal. I had this great idea for a new program I was going to write, and I needed to get some thoughts down quickly before I forgot them.

Luckily for me, I managed to find access to a computer at the University of Helsinki. At this point in my life, my Finnish was passable at best, but I convinced a passing student, Linus, to find me a place. While I was jotting down ideas, I was rapidly explaining them to him. He seemed very pleased to let me use his account to store the code until I could retrieve it later, but left me at that point to continue his studies. I spent the rest of that day putting together a rather nice bit of code that I planned on evolving once I returned.

Upon my return home, I noticed that the code I had written was no longer on the University's servers. I was unable to log on to Linus' account, and I was also unable to get him a message. At the time I accepted the loss because I was thoroughly uninspired regarding my code, and, as all good programmers know, programming requires inspiration. No big deal, I thought; I'll just do it again later when the urge comes over me.

It wasn't until a few years later that I heard of Linux. The name of the author sounded familiar... where had I heard it before? I downloaded Linux, and started looking through the source to get an idea of what exactly it could do and how I could help. Things were going well until a section of code I was looking through gave me a deja-vu type feeling. I understood what it did - but that was impossble, I'd read less than half of it. All the same, I knew what it was going to be like when I looked over the rest. Sure enough, there was my code.

This was taken in good stride, as I only wanted my code back, and was happy to see it improved upon. From then to now, I have followed the development of Linux through the ages, and I am dismayed by certain companies who are trying to cash in on what is quite obviously my intellectual property. So, SCO and Prentice Hall, beware! Withdraw your claims, or I shall charge you twice what you make for using my IP.

Author's Note: If you hadn't guessed it by now, this is humor. Entirely fictional humor, at that. Aside from my name and the fact that I am a programmer and freelance writer, none of this is true. I wrote this in response to Jan Stafford's Who Wrote Linux?. I hope everyone enjoyed it.

This document was written by Preston St. Pierre and may be reproduced under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike.