Torvalds talks like a pirate

Linux creator Linus Torvalds on Thursday signaled his enjoyment of the annual "Talk Like a Pirate Day" festivities, using the nautical lexicon to launch an update to the kernel at the heart of the open-source operating system.

"Ahoy! She's good to go, hoist anchor!" wrote Torvalds in a public announcement on Wednesday of version 2.6.18 of the Linux kernel. "Here's some real booty for all you landlubbers," he continued.

"There's not too many changes, with t'bulk of the patch bein' defconfig updates, but the shortlog at the aft of this here e-mail describes the details if you care, you scurvy dogs," he wrote.

Signing his missive "Linus 'but you can call me Cap'n,'" Torvalds went on to assign watery nicknames to a number of well-known kernel developers, as follows:

Al "bilge rat" Viro
"Cap'n" Andrew Morton
Paul "peg leg" Mackerras

He also sprinkled pirate vernacular throughout the e-mail detailing the kernel update, for example:

[MTD] NAND: keelhaul marooned URL in Kconfig
e1000: fix bilge-sucking TX timout hang regression for 82542rev3
[ARM] 3793/1: S3C2412: fix barnacles in wrong serial info struct
[Shiver me timbers] EXT2: Remove superblock lock contention in ext2_statfs
Davy Jones: Didn't do anything, the scurvy lad. Ahoy!
Well blow me down, if he didn't fix 'make headers_check' on ia64
[JFFS2][SUMMARY] Fix a bilge-suckin' summary collectin' bug. Arrr!
genirq: Fix the typo in IRQ resend smartly, cabin boy!

is on Sept. 19. The event encourages people world-wide to use pirate terms in their everyday speech.

Renai LeMay reported for ZDNet Australia from Sydney.