It truly is fascinating when you read about an accusation of anybody being a thief and a scam artist.  An individual blogger who calls himself Penguin Pete believes that the TUX500 Project is a scam.  This rhetoric unfortunately borders not only on the absurd, but crosses the line into libel territory.  Yes, folks.  Things such as this are powerful enough to not only endanger employment and damage personal reputations, but depending on what the person was doing in their life, it could cause other problems as well.

You see, this individual is precisely the type of person that I have described on my own radio show in the past (though the person I talked to specifically was a different individual), and ever so briefly in the last article.  There are those who want to feel like they are true rebels and are therefore afraid to truly succeed or for their cause to succeed.  I won't go into too much detail about his past accusations of TUX500 as they have already been dealt with.  The focus will be on his most recent accusation: That the TUX500 Project is in violation of the Linux Trademark.

No, you did not just smoke pot without realizing it.  Those bloodshot eyes are more likely to be from lack of sleep or allergies.  This is not a hallucination.  He actually asked if TUX500 violated the Linux trademark.


For those who are wondering why this person wants to know this, it is quite simple: by complaining to the kernel developers and ultimately, Linus Torvalds himself, he appears to be hoping that the TUX500 website would be shut down.



He starts off with the false notion that the TUX500 Project is an attempt to tell the entire community what to do.  That is simply not the case.  For starters, when did Ken Starks or Bob Moore ever claim that he spoke for the entire Linux community?  Where on their sites do they state as such?  He is putting words in other peoples' mouths, which is why I said that he's crossing over into the territory known as libel: He's wide open for a lawsuit, yet he doesn't appear to understand the gravity of his own situation.


He doesn't like the fact that there is currently a car that sports Tux, the Linux mascot on the front.  So allow me to dissect the words in the graphic above.  He wants the project shut down by Torvalds and the kernel developers, and he does not want individuals who disagree with him to post.  He appears to be on a power trip (it's his blog afterall).  He accuses Bob Moore and Ken Starks of coercing an entire community into supporting TUX500, yet he turns around and asks others to do his work for him?  Wait a minute.

Acceleration Marketing is an agency involved in advertising, and like any business, they have their own concerns with legalities and what have you.  Does Pete honestly think that they are so stupid that they would become involved in a project that would open them up for a lawsuit by Linus Torvalds or the kernel developers?  I don't think so.  Do you, the reader think so?  It appears to me that Penguing Pete has had a running problem with Ken Starks for a long time as he mostly focuses on him rather than Bob Moore.  The main problem with Pete is that he has a personal vendetta against Starks and wants anything that Starks is behind to fail miserably, even if it damages the Free and Open Source Software movements.  Think about that one for a second.

What's worse, if anybody disagrees with him, especially if they themselves have promoted TUX500, then he will delete the comments at all costs.  Does he not want the other side of the story to be told on his own blog?  Last night, I posted a comment in his blog explaining why I did not think that what he was saying was true.  I simply said that I disagreed with what he was saying.


When I woke up today, and hit the refresh button in my browser window, I caught this little tidbit, which was another false accusation on his part:


What he appears to be doing is quite petty, and any time TUX500 has been in the press, in he jumps with words of negativity and false accusations.  The beginning of his blog post is riddled with errors that are easily disproven.  Not only that, what if he winds up damaging innocent people in the process?  I don't know if he's thought about that, but it's highly doubtful, and I sincerely hope that is not his motive.  Allow me to close with two very important questions:

1. What in the world are you smoking Penguin Pete?
2. Can I have some too?