Verity is the pseudonym of a programmer based in the UK. She can be contacted at [email protected].
Ms. Stob has decided to quit the cathedral and set up her stall in the bazaar.
Before we start properly, I have an important announcement. After much consideration in my established role as lead developer, I have decided to go Open Source with this column. Even as you read, we have top-notch lawyers in the backroom working their pale little fingers to the bone to get a license agreement together. It's going to be mostly GPL with a light sprinkling of Mozilla on top and a few lines from Microsoft's justly famous new Multimedia Player "We Have Copyrighted Your Thoughts" license to give it piquancy.
There will soon be a press release on the Stob web site that uses the adjective "leading," applied to this column, many times; also "innovative," "respected," and perhaps, relying on the laziness of reporters in this sector and their failure to check claims too boring and vague to argue about, "award-winning."
This column that you plan to make, Open Source, what strength is it?
It is industrial strength.
And is it a fragile column, or is it a robust column?
Verily it is robust; yea robust as only well-proven technology can be. But note that, although well proven, it is not so well proven as to have become "legacy."
Will there be lots of feeble Open Source wordplay, for example, referring to the FSF as a bunch of "gnerds"?
Heaven forefend.
Will I soon be able to develop my own improved and debugged column, using this column as source?
But of course. And if—obviously this is a hypothetical situation, but perhaps best to address it straight off—and if the manufacturer of the original column were by some chance to find herself a victim of writer's block and so having difficulty dirtying the page, she would feel free to plunder jokes from derived columns as she saw fit.
You puzzle me. How does this differ from her current practice?
You'll get such a slap...
And will there be a rather contrived list of Frequently Asked Questions?
You are not here for the hunting, are you?
News Just In
And already I have some more excellent news. The hilarious backpage column "Laugh At First Byte" from that esteemed monthly organ PC Computing Buyer Today World Pro has agreed also to go Open Source and to join forces with us. Working together, we will produce a reengineered, cross-platform product appealing not only to programmers and analysts but also to the Big Computer-Consuming Public. We will reach everybody from the terrified older person making her first tentative clicks onto the Web to look at her little granddaughter's homepage right the way down to the Certified Exchange Server consultant hidden at the bottom of his burrow counting his money with mucilaginous paws.
Sadly, the first joke from "LAFB," that elderly aphorism "Beware Geeks bearing GIFs," has run into difficulties. For one thing, our legal people have not yet cleared things up with Unisys. We do need to sort this as "Geeks bearing PNGs" just doesn't have the same impact. Second, establishing IP rights to this joke is by no means a straightforward process as there are many thousands of people who believe that they themselves coined it—including, for example, everybody who happened to have a CompuServe account in the years 1990-95. Finally, and this may be the clincher, nobody finds it funny any more.
Another Development
There has been Another Development in the Open Sourcing of this column. A dispute has broken out over a limerick slated for inclusion two paragraphs down:
A certain young drunk from Strathclyde
Demanded his chips should be fried
But alas! and alack!
He was in Radio Shack
And now he's got Intel Inside®.
Certain puritan developers have objected to it on the ground that, although it puns the word "chip" in the British sense of an obese albino French fry and assumes local knowledge of Scots grease-based cuisine, this is contradicted by the use of the U.S. form "Radio Shack" for a chain of stores known as "Tandy" in Britain. Thus, these developers claim, the internal logic of the limerick is "brain damaged," and the only realistic way forward is to develop a new limerick from scratch. They are also annoyed because their patch to change the main rhyme to "ope" got dropped on the floor.
I regret to inform those of you who haven't been following the disgraceful flame war in our newsgroup that, as predicted in the previous paragraph, a faction of developers has now forked off (careful). We absolutely cannot tolerate this sort of thing. We are sure all our readers will want to remain with this, the only true version of the Stob column, and will be careful to avoid any variants that they find being hawked about, which, by the way, will probably make your machine crash and leave a gaping hole in your security.
Inevitable Conclusion
After much discussion, I have decided to hastily withdraw this column from Open Source and pretend that nothing happened. Regular industry watchers will recognise this as the "Interbase" License. We feel that a Closed Source model, where I get the money up front and you can all bog off, is much more in our readers' interests.
Although it is no longer free as in beer, nor yet free as in speech, this column continues to make the proud boast that it is free in the sense that you are free to read it once you have paid for it. Thank you for your kind attention. Good morning.
DDJ
