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Raleigh, NC - Red Hat has teamed up with Fox to to produce a new
show based largely around the successful Joe Millionaire program.
Twenty programmers will be flown to Raleigh to vie for the heart
and root privileges of a Linux OS.
 Each
programmer will be assigned a piece of unsupported hardware and must
create a driver to incorporate into the Red Hat Linux distribution
with a chance to win one million dollars. Each week programmers will
be eliminated by a panel of judges including American Idol's Simon
Cowell.
In some promotional material already released, Cowell displayed
his usual acerbity. "Your pointer conversion was just... absolutely
atrocious. It's painful to look at," he screeched as he berated
contestant Hardy Caster. "It's possibly the worst use of an
ADT I've ever seen. I'm dead serious, maybe you should stick to COBOL.
I mean, it's like you're not even trying to free memory."
"I'm so glad I was chosen," said Ving Shu, a contestant
and programmer from the Los Angeles area. "I never thought I'd
get the chance to program an esoteric driver for the one million
dollars. It's like a geek fairy tale come true like The Little
Engine that Could (Render Polygons Instantaneously)."
Producers have yet to finalize a title for the show, but have considered
several ideas including: Joe Programmer, Who Wants to Program
a Low-Level Driver?, Geek Idols and We're Running Out
of Ideas.
The production team has already begun filming and say the show should
be ready to air in 2012. Ideally it will be commercial free. Microsoft
is concerned about the publicity this will generate for the competing,
no-cost operating system and says they are planning their own reality
show "Reboot Island" which will air on another network
at the same time.
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