What does a Pink Farting Weasel have to do with free & open source software?

To answer the question in brief, it’s a codename.

Codenames are a common fact of life in information technology; everyone large and small uses them. For instance, the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution names its releases after animals preceded by an adjective (see list), whilst the venerable Debian, from which many distros take their inspiration (and code! Ed.), names its releases after characters in the film Toy Story, with the unstable version always bearing the name sid.

Anyway, back to flatulent weasels… The chief scribe discovered today that releases of the Linux kernel have code names too. Most of the Linux 2.6 and 3.x kernels include a name in the Makefile of their source trees, which can be found in the git repository. Here’s a selection of some of the more bizarre ones:

• Divemaster Edition (news passim)
• Woozy Numbat
• Jeff Thinks I Should Change This, But To What?
• Pink Farting Weasel
• Sheep on Meth
• Erotic Pickled Herring
• Saber-toothed Squirrel

Wikipedia has a full list of Linux kernel names.

Tip of the hat: Ubuntu Vibes