“Did the drafters of Australia’s new Net censorship legislation
ever imagine that their rules might ban Linux? After all, the Linux
source code has quite a few instances of the word ‘fuck’ sprinkled
throughout, mostly as commentary about problems with software. Can
an operating system be considered unsuitable for minors?”
“Using grep — the powerful Unix search command — to go through
a recent version of Linux, I came up with some comment lines and
error messages that were clearly intended as the sort of coarse
humor engineers of all sorts engage in…”
“The problem is, while adult engineers might find commentary
such as this humorous, the sort of people who want to censor the
Internet are more likely to find it offensive. Which leads us back
to the simple question: How will the Linux source code fare if the
the Australian censorship law passes?”