[cantrevealname]

The author did all that work as a joke? I hardly think so.

I looked at the source code. It's 5,575 lines of original C code. (I excluded the AES encryption, bzip2, Reed-Solomon, and CRC16 source code from my count.)

I imagine that he wrote the words "open source joke" as a defense mechanism against people who would mock his efforts with lines like "please tell me this is a troll", "that is completely unnecessary", and "an incredibly silly idea".

Lots of people make self-effacing remarks when they introduce a work that they know will draw criticism: "It's just a first draft, it needs a lot more work." "I hacked it up during lunch [when it really took two weeks]." Etc.

[geon]

> The author did all that work as a joke? I hardly think so.

Possibly not a joke per se. But have you never written something substantial just for fun?