ShillingForDollars™

I’m not an expert on creative writing, so the following is fairly speculative.

There are some sick, sick, sick people out there who will sell their soul by writing for a living. Some of them will even do it by making offensive and anti-Linux comments in obscure blogs read by nobody, the goddamn M$ shills! They will be repaid, many times, by the Devil of Redmond; but hate is in their hearts, and they will suffer rightly through their very being come PenguinDay™.

Then again, there are those wonderful people who actually author pro-linux blogs; which is great, because it’s all part of the community.

And, even better, there are people like Steven J Vaughan Nichols (and a basement army too vast to enumerate), who spend their life toiling in the sallow groves of the public good.

What makes them do it? The case for Linux is unanswerable. It requires no justification, no detail, no analysis. These fine young men could be out there writing programs, or buffing up an interface, or (in the rare cases where they are not “gurus of teh codez”) helping out with the documentation.

What makes them do it?

Clearly, nobody would pay them more than a cent per thousand words; certainly not if the editor in question had actually read any of those thousand words. These selfless individuals preach from poverty. In fact, they probably eat their own dogfood.

What more can an honest man give, for the cause of freedom, than to toil ceaselessly over a recompiled and patched version of OOo (Linux desktop only, please!) for a handful of loose change every other week?

And, of course, to come up with tasty recipes involving dog food. I recommend the following slogans: “Zesty,” “Tangy,” “Just like your gramma made it,” and “You don’t need that.”