The real Fake Linus Torvalds has been selected

The jig is up, and the Silver Penguin award has been presented to the winner of the Fake Linus Torvalds competition! Before you learn who won, though, you need to know who was actually playing. As you recall, four famous people were pretending to be Linus on Twitter and Identi.ca, and the community selected their favorite.

The participants were:

1. Dan Lyons (aka Fake Steve Jobs), reporter for Newsweek
2. Matt Asay, blogger for CNET.com
3. Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier, openSUSE Community Manager at Novell
4. Jono Bacon, Ubuntu Community Manager at Canonical

And the winner of the Silver Penguin is: Matt Asay! The runner-up was Jono Bacon.

Here’s a terrific quote from Matt:

Linus Torvalds is such an impressive figure, even being his facsimile is an honor. Linus is, of course, the founder of the Linux kernel, but he also represents the soul of open source: open without being dogmatic, collaborative while still being sharp-witted and sharp-elbowed, and quality and performance above all. I won’t be faking his voice anymore, but I do hope to emulate it.

Congratulations, Matt, and great work to everyone involved!

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