SauceForTheGander™

Hello, class, and thanks for wandering in to Elementary Logic 101.

I realise that you were expecting a lecture by my colleague, The Amazing Jumping Flea, PhD (calculus), on the topic of Gotos and their Inevitable Blessed Utility in a Driverless Kernel … and Matron tells me that he will be all better next week or so. He’s prepared some Power Point slides in Libre Office, and you can collect them at the front desk.

As his locum, I am here to talk about … no, not the awful film featuring Norman Wisdom and, I seem to recall, Judy Geeson … by no means that. I am here to talk about a Central Paradox.

To whit: Free Open Source Software is Nothing, if it is not about your ability, yes, I’m talking to you in the back row there, huffing glue, yes, you, to understand and manipulate and benefit from said software: specifically, by using your God Given Programming Talents.

I assume all of you took that course down in the basement on the old campus on autoconf. Good. Then we can proceed.

As you know, Linux is Free (as in thought). It is, by decree and diktat, designed by magic pixies for ignorant scum such as your grandmother.

Who, obviously, is unlikely to be able to program in C. (Which is fine! There’s a lot of Python in the current Linux Desktop! Python is ideal for Grandmothers, particularly when stripping on grab-a-grannie night. We’ll be giving out free floppies.)

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So, let’s just get this straight, shall we?

The whole assumed point of “Free Open Source Software” is that you, the lucky recipient, have total access to the code and can fix anything in the blink of a million eyes.

But what if you cannot program?

I mean, there’s no shame attached. I can’t even do my own accounts, for God’s sake.

And here’s the point of the TM:

If you can’t program, you might just as well pay somebody else to do it. That would be about $30 off the top of your laptop for the Windows license.

Do we have a problem with that? If so, do we have an acceptable alternative?

Face it, freetards: 99% of the population do not have the ability or the desire to program, let alone deal with bugs.

Given that, what is the point of this bizarrely constricted “freedom”?

You little twerps are a part of that 99%, and can’t even program: so what the hell do you gain from this futile farrago?

To quote Ali G: “Do you hate me 'coz I is a logo contest?” Well, no, I’m pretty much a liberal where logo contests are concerned. But have you noticed that most of us (goose) programmers actually loathe and despise you (gander) freetards?

Wake up and smell the goose-fat. The vast preponderance of you just cannot program to save your lives, can you? Given that, precisely what does FOSS offer you?