OK, we've all heard the joke about Microsoft being a car and having to press the horn, flash the lights and open the drivers door to reset. I reckon it's about time the tables were turned:

And if Linux was a car:

1) It would come as a kit along with a copy of CAR HOWTO which would be six months out of date.

2) You would also get three steering wheels and five headlights as part of the standard installation then be expected to pick which ones you wanted to use. There would be constant flame wars between the users of leather steering wheels and the users of the plastic variety.

3) Due to its excessive size the car would not fit into a standard car parking bay and it would be up to the new owner to trim bits off until it could fit.

4) The car would not use a standard radio wiring harness unless you patched the engine compartment using WIRING.TAR.GZ which would only be available by download from the manufacturers website.

5) Support for the linux car would be available from either the car manufacturer (after taking out a maintenance contract and paying a fee) or by logging onto alt.linux.car.problems where every request for assistance would be met with 'RTFM !! V4|\|C3D l3e+$peA| i$ whEn J00 +4lK L1K3 t|-|15. t0 u|\|d3r$+@|\|D jOo |\/|u5+ be lEET. 1f J00 4r3 NO+ lEe+ jOO C@|\|N0T 5p3A| 0r ReAd +|-|I5

6) Adding accessories to the car would be a nightmare. For example you could not add a pair of foglights on the front unless you had the following 'libraries' installed in your car.
bumper.lib.1_6_483865
electrics.lib_3_RH_9_ 35
controls.lib.14_6_99
If an attempt to run your foglights without these libraries were to be made (or the libraries were a different version) your foglights MIGHT work but if they didn't there would be no support as the maintainer of electrics.lib_3_RH_9_35 can no longer be found.

7) You could only use your car with a trailer if you rebuilt the engine, this time with support for your model of trailer.

8) Your car would be of doubtful heritage. Parts of the design would be claimed by Novell, other sections would be (C) The Open Linux Group and SCO will lay claim to the whole concept and demand $699 for continued use. One guy in Finland would claim that he designed the whole thing and Richard Stallman would claim that your car is really called GNU Car.

9) Your car would take over five minutes to start. Faster starting methods would be available but be more unreliable, for example the brakes might not work after you start.

10) There would be no warning lights on the car dashboard. All warnings concerning oil, water, lighting and general failures would be written to the /var/log/ directory where the driver and passenger can read them when they pull over and park.

11) Additional storage could be achieved by using a roofrack, but the roofrack would be invisible until the driver issued the command 'mount -t /dev/roofrack /roof'. There would be problems unless the driver used the command 'umount /roof' before unscrewing the roofrack. Not all roofracks would work and some would just come back with the message 'roofrack is not a roof device' when issued with the mount command (and still remain invisible).

Any more ?

Ed Almos