Microsoft Buys Linux (April Fool)

At a small press conference in Nepal, attended by two Sherpas and a Yak, as well as a THG stringer, Microsoft spokeswoman Avril Wonful announced that the Redmond company had acquired Linux. Although this surreptitious attempt by Microsoft to kill the Open Source community was supposed to go unnoticed, THG sources had long known that Microsoft executives were holed up in a Buddhist monastery in the area, meditating and trying to achieve greater self-awareness.

"I think we are all comfortable with being rich, and having very little to think about while our dominant operating system and office productivity units keep printing the big bucks," said one executive. "But, we felt that we need to find something more altruistic, something that would let us give back to the industry for being so generous to us. We also needed to stick it to the MSN and Xbox groups, who are dragging the stock price down."

So it was that after a few days of living on sticky rice and tofu, the Microsoft executives came up with a plan to buy Linux. They made a few calls, and realized that no one really wanted to own Linux, and that it was available for next to nothing. In fact, according to sources intimate with the deal making process, Linux was pretty much given away, and Microsoft's negotiators could not believe their luck.

"You know, we're used to paying a lot of money for stuff that never gives us much of a return, like WebTV, Apple, and Corel. Now, we get this Linux thing, and it's dirt cheap, and you know, it's, like, unbelievable. Apparently, it's just like Windows, but we don't need to have whole teams of programmers and support staff to maintain it. There's, like, all these people who'll do that work for nothing. We're seriously thinking of getting rid of Windows and just selling Linux. Sweet!" said another executive on condition of anonymity.