A Revolution by Any Other Name...

Brent Toderash Explains the Penguinista Moniker

Ancient cultures believed that the name was everything. In their view, the name gave power - if you named something, you owned it. This view extended even into the metaphysical realm, where they believed that if you knew the name of a spirit, you could control it to do your bidding - hence the magician's "familiar." A name is a powerful thing.

The power aspect of a name had nothing to do with the Penguinista moniker, but it makes a good introduction. Names are important, but sometimes they land flippantly. So it was with "Penguinista." April 20, 1999 was a day like any other, a day on which I hit several news-oriented websites looking for Linux-related newsbytes. I found a few, and as I had done on several occasions before, I pasted two or three urls into an email and sent it off to three friends who shared an interest in the Linux operating system. Since there was more than one story linked in my email, I couldn't draw on the article titles to provide a descriptive subject line, and I searched the grey matter for something witty. "News of interest to people who advocate Linux" was descriptive, but hardly witty. What do you call such people, anyway? Penguin - something... something revolutionary - sounding... Penguinista. The Penguinista! News was thus conceived in this unassuming fashion on April 20th, 1999.

I continued thus, forwarding occasional snippets of news to a few friends, sometimes using the Penguinista nickname, and sometimes not. It was in June 1999, a couple of months after the initial Penguinista mention, that Scott Toderash (yes, we're brothers) set up an email script on his web server so that we could easily send out these newsbytes on a subscription basis to anyone who was interrested. The Penguinista News was born. With just two contributors and a handful of subscribers, it was nothing fancy at the outset, just a little script downloaded from BigNoseBird and tweaked slightly (it has since been enhanced somewhat). The back-issues were made searchable a few months later, and we began to add a few online feature articles early in 2000.

My wife began hear the name "Penguinista" around the house, and I'm not entirely sure she approved at first... she said it sounded like "some kind of leftist group." Maybe it does - but that's not the point. I think it's a cool name, and one that evokes images of a group like - as it was later dubbed - "The Linux Liberation Army." The image of Tux is hardly menacing, and this is the mold that fits well for a group of people, Penguinistas, who avidly cheer on the Linux operating system, but in a most benevolent fashion. After all, if you genuinely come under the influence of the Linux Liberation Army and succumb, you're both going to come out "winners." After all, we're just preaching the good news of "unassimilation."

We continued using this new name, and sometime in the fall of 1999, I noticed an equaintance had also started using it - I didn't recall ever having mentioned it to him, but Xavier Basora was now using the term as well. Shortly afterward, it started to appear in online articles by such journalists as Joe Barr and others... or at least, we started noticing it. Xavier and I began forwarding articles to one another wherever we saw the "Penguinista" name in use. In actual fact, I had not used the name in correspondence with Xavier - it had occurred to him just as naturally as it had to me, and he had passed it along to Joe Bar, and later wrote elsewhere on his use of the term, and our mutual "invention" thereof. Kevin Reichard over at Linux Planet tells me that he has also been using the name since some time in late 1996 or early 1997 and recalls it in use by Phil Hughes at Linux Journal a year earlier. The name actually appears to be one of those natural associations, but whether it simply occurs to someone or whether they hear it from another source, it seems to be catchy - at least, we think so.

For us, at least, one thing eventually led to another, and the Penguinistas became organized as a group rather than just a name - we're now a .org, just to prove the point. The volume of daily news within the scope of The Penguinista News became too great for a weekly email (though you can still subscribe to the top weekly stories) around this time, so a manifesto and a website later, and here we are. Welcome to the Liberation.