Faced with former Massachusetts CIO Peter Quinn's harsh appraisal of the real reason behind the "inertia" of Linux in the business world, Linus Torvalds and OSDL have come up with an action plan for rebranding the Linux image and the image of its core developers. They have jointly agreed on the formation of OSDSU, the world's first Open Source Dress for Success University.

Torvalds himself will teach a course on "Introductory sandal wearing," placing particular emphasis on sock selection. "Color is so important," Torvalds notes. "You want both socks to share the same color base, and yet it needs to stand out from the pale flesh of a kernel hacker and show off the sandals to their best advantage."

OSDL CEO Stuart Cohen said that in all his years at IBM, Dell, and elsewhere in the corporate world, he never saw a good idea come from anyone with a ponytail. "Haircuts are key to brain activity," Cohen says. "You learn this in MBA school. I don't know where these scalawags on the LKML ever got the notion that long hair and sandals were conducive to good code."

"We're determined to break out of this inertia thing," Torvalds says. "If we work hard enough, and long enough, on perfecting the image of our developers, we can deliver a better kernel. I'm revising git now to accept developer labels indicating hair length and the date and grade of their last appearance review. I can be a cruel bastard when it comes to accepting patches from unkempt hackers."

Cohen concluded their opening remarks with the observation that if OSDSU works as planned, the open source community "can be as successful at delivering new products, bug-free and on time, as Microsoft is doing with Vista."