MAKE IT STOP ARRGGHH's Journal: Open Source Software Supports Slavery

As I've been perusing Slashdot, I've noticed that many compare Microsoft to an "Evil Empire" and Linux to righteous "rebels" similar to those in the Star Wars sagas. However, I believe they've got things back-asswards here. Linux is much more like the rebels of the dastardly Confederacy of Southern states during the American Civil War. Many Linux, BSD, and other "alternative" Operating System users are dirty, unshaven, and smelly, much like most of the South was at that time. Their support of their strange version of "user's rights" are similar to the cry for state's rights espoused by the Confederacy. Their contempt for Microsoft's power is similar to the South's dissatisfaction and resulting jealousy of the North's industrial and commerical power. However, the most important issue (although it wasn't the focus of that war, despite what revisionist historians tell you) is the slavery supported by the Open Source movement. Much like the South's use of negroes for slave labor, the Open Source movement seeks to force programmers to code without any hope of financial reward for their efforts. Zealots make ridiculous claims that writing software is some kind of labor of love and one can easily envision apologist plantation owners using to defend their own terrible abuse of basic human rights. Aren't software programmers people like the rest of us (although that point may be debated, I do think that the same people who consider them to be inferior, not fully developed humans will be proven as wrong as the people who said that about negroes in the past). It's also easy to liken Bill Gates to Abraham Lincoln, the honest father figure leading the software community through this crisis with the righteous might of Microsoft being similar to that of the Norther states. What's needed however is someone similar to John Brown, the righteous man who helped set off the powder keg that eventually liberated the American negro population. The continued abuse of computer programmers' rights must end now, Microsoft MUST triumph in this most important battle!

free verse

[bobtheprophet]

are you some kind of
genius
or are you
just
weird?