Bacon Lovers up in Arms Over Ximian Keyword Purchase

by Leonard Richardson

Published on segfault.org 02/13/2001

"It's a crisp, delicious outrage!" claims bacon fan Mitchell Tucker. He's referring to Linux desktop company Ximian's recent purchase of bacon-related keywords such as "bacon" using Google's AdWords system.

Many in the bacon-loving community are angered by Ximian's latest enroachment on the traditionally noncommercial world of fried pork. Some have expressed confusion as to what the hell bacon has to do with the GNOME desktop, or even with the GTK graphics toolkit and Bonobo component architecture which underly GNOME.

Ximian president and CEO Nat Friedman earlier denied charges of being on crack. "When people think of fresh, crunchy bacon, frizzled in pork fat, they think of GNOME," said Friedman in an open letter on Ximian's website. "On crack" allegations continue unabated.

"Sure, I like bacon," said KDE developer Andreas Pour. "In fact, I like Jono Bacon. But I don't go around buying the relevant Google keywords, do I?" Pour denied having himself recently purchased the Google keyword "hot ass" to point to his personal home page, saying "Who told you that?". [Not a denial. --ed.]

The authors of BUD (Bacon Unified Desktop) have not yet responed to the move.