Subject: all our oysters now inedible!
From: Nev Dull <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked] (/dev/null)
Date: Thu, 4 Nov 1999 08:05:00 -0500 (EST)

Bill Joy recites at SF Poetry Slam
By Routers staff troll writer Django Shoenstopper, Copyright, 1999

Bill Joy, best known as one of the principal engineers and Operating
Systems software developers at Sun Microsystems, and formerly a core
developer of the free BSD UNIX operating system written at the
University of Berkeley in the late '70's and early '80's, let down his
hair yesterday and was caught reciting at a well known San Francisco
Poetry Slam. Mr.  Joy took the stage right after the well known
Amistad Maupin, author of the classic "Tales of the City" series,
recited his famous "Ode to the claw-like scratches on this '70's bath
house table" during the "Queen Phatima Amazon-Girl With
Short-Spiked-Hair Poetry Slam" and let loose his own sort of software
"Howl" to the delight of audience software developers and the
engineering uninitiated alike.

Entitled "Free means FREE GODDAMMIT! (the GPL is EVIL)" Mr. Joy
eloquently presented his opinion on the Free Software licensing debate
which has raged through engineering circles ever since East Coast
programmer and Free Software advocate Richard Stallman hired several
copyright attorneys to develop his so-called "CopyLeft" General Public
License.

Here is an excerpt:

 Free means FREE GODDAMMIT! (the GPL is EVIL)

 I sit here at my terminal
 coding a storm in my vi,
 a malloc() for some array,
 while strncpy() bounds a check,
 but inside I seethe --  inside I rumble,
 at all the lines locked up,
 and the derived headers claimed with glee,
 for I know the caged free()
 consumed by the GPL!

 Free means FREE GODDAMMIT,
 it means I take and offer as I please,
 it doesn't mean to taint my work,
 just because I swiped some header,
 or one little readline, 
 it's the state of being FREE,
 as opposed to the state of being NOT FREE!

 Don't you understand RMS,
 the  GPL is EVIL!,
 it's a blight of a free license,
 and a virus to behold,
 consuming all code afterwards,
 in an atomic chain reaction,
 like red tide spread across our ocean,
 all our oysters now inedible!

 Free coders far and wide,
 listen to my swan-song by the sea,
 for while Solaris kicks BSD's ass,
 and my SCSL is a sight to see,
 at least BSD and MIT leave code FREE,
 unlike that UNAMERICAN red GPL crap,
 with it RMS will suck you dry,
 Because Free means FREE GODDAMMIT!
 and The GPL is EVIL!

When asked for comment Richard Stallman had only this to say,"Wow,
Bill is a terrible poet!" 

But some here suspect that Mr. Stallman's response only belies both his
East Coast snobbery for missing out on the new poetry slam revolution
here in San Francisco, and his envy at Mr. Joy's enlightened West
Coast writing style and attitude.