of source code is what Gernot Heiser, John Ferlito, Conrad Parker, Jamie Wilkinson, myself, and a host of around 20 other other, mostly ex-UNSW students just paid for a copy of the revered Lions' Book.
That's right, between us, we kicked in $10,000 Australian dollars to buy a copy of the book which has been signed by both Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie of UNIX fame, along with Kirk McKusick who wrote the Design and implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System, Eric Allman author of sendmail, and Linus Torvalds creator of the Linux kernel. It also had the signatures of all the speakers from the 2006 linux.conf.au.
Of course with any LCA bidding process there were some other non material rewards on offer. With the $10,000 bid we also won a lot of hair, including Rusty's mustache, Jdub's hair, and Greg "Groggy" Lehey's beard! OMG! LOL!
Oh yeah... so why were people happy to offer such money and go to such lengths, on one side, it is the awesome respect people have to John Lions, who is a leading light in the idea of open source UNIX. And also I think the respect graduates have for UNSW's School of Computer Science and Engineering. The money from the auction will go towards creating a perpetual chair in John Lions' name. And even better, Linux Australia is contributing massively by matching the bid, raising the donation to $20,000 and USENIX is doubling this again to give a grand total of $40,000 towards the Opearting Systems chair at UNSW. This is pretty impressive! Hopefully by the time linux.conf.au rolls around next year, we will be able to announce that the chair is fully funded!
Oh, and a big thanks to John maddog Hall for organising the auction and the prizes.