Ladies and gentlemen¹, we are just as pleased as punch to bring you our first ever Guest Editorial, and boy do we have a great one to start out with. Yes, today we are proud to publish wit and wisdom from beyond the grave. We present the undead father of Open Source, a great man and now a great zombie, please put your keyboards together for Zombie Richard M. Stallman!

BRAAAAINS! BRAAAAAAINSSSS! Hahaha, sorry, little zombie joke there.

Thank you, Mr. Dickson, for that lovely introduction. By the way, “Zombie Richard M. Stallman” is my mundane name, you all can call me ZRMS.  Yes, I return from an untimely death, pushed upon me by that cowardly Raymond and separatist Torvalds to let the people of the world of the living know what I think about your software development strategies.  The advantage of death is that it unclouds your vision and frees your thinking.  Suddenly I understand the appeal of Java to developers and, while I don’t agree with it, I see why so many users use Windows. But most of all I have come to love what I thought I would always hate: your little “Mac” computers.

I always thought that Macs were just toys for the closed-source bourgeoisie, playthings for the rich and unenlightened. But suddenly CARS is funny², and  now I see the beauty, the symmetry of using a closed source mach system on top of the stable, reliable, open source Unix foundation.  I see the elegance of two licenses for each piece of software, the beauty of not knowing when your next update will be coming out.  I also see all people as basically walking delicatessens, but again, that’s a zombie thing.

So does that mean that I, the reanimated corpus of RMS, have started using an iMac to do all my otherworldly programming and checking my email?  No.  I use the real æthernet, a network the likes of which you mortals cannot comprehend, to transmit my thoughts as data structures directly to those that need them.  It’s like wireless, but far, far spookier and cooler. Also we get, like, 9800GBps transfer rates, so my BitTorrent ratio has gone up quite a bit.

Sorry, wandered a bit from my point there.  My point is that there is so much more to worry about in life other than how “open” your license is, how much you can do to absolutely mod your OS to your exact tastes, and that all the time we spent being rabid about the Firefox logo not being 100% free seems kinda silly now.  I mean, eventually you have to use that computer for something, right? Sure Gentoo kicks Windows all round the block in terms of speed and stabilizability, and sure freedom of computers is important, and someone needs to keep Microsoft in check, but there does come a point where enough is sufficient, and you just need to stop recompiling your kernel and write that thesis paper you’ve been avoiding all semester.

I don’t know why I didn’t think this way when I was alive.  Chemicals, probably.  When you’re alive you have all this adrenalin, testosterone, endorphins, and all that other chemical muck swilling around inside of you, screwing up your thinking and making you want to hit things all day long.  Or something.  Ever since I was brought back to this plane by that itinerant Voodoo priest my memories of my past life are somewhat confused.  I mean, I know that I didn’t like someone called Bill Gates, and every once in a while I suddenly remember  being really happy writing code to be compatible with the 80386 processor, but I don’t really remember why I did like 80386′s and didn’t like Gates.

Guess what I use computers for now. Go on, guess.  I use them to tell really awesome zombie jokes.  Wanna hear some?  C’mon, be a sport. No?  Fine. Be that way. I’ma go eat Steve Ballmer’s brain.  I could use a light snack.

HA! Sneaked a zombie joke right past you! ZING!

No, okay, I was being serious. I’m hungry. Later, fruit lovers.

1. or to judge from our comments: Lady and Gentleman
2. had to sneak a trackback link in here somewhere

“It was for his own good, really,” remarked Eric S. Raymond.  ”He was getting, well, rabid is the only way to describe it.  I mean, some of the things he wanted to put into GPL 3.0 were just strange. I won’t get into specifics, but where would we even find a kangaroo suit in Linus Torvalds’ size?”

Raymond assured us that it was done in the most humane way possible. “We brought him into a nice living room with Charles in Charge on the TV. He loved Charles in Charge…” Raymond paused for a moment, his eyes moist. “Sorry…  Anyway, while he was distracted by the antics of the lovable Scott Baio and Nicole Eggert, a technician came in behind him and injected 40,000 lines of pure Windows ME source code into his beard.  Richard was gone before the second commercial break.”  Tears were running openly down his face at this point. “We’ll miss you, big guy.”

In recent months Stallman’s mental stability has weakened, as evidenced by a recent manifesto calling for a change in the name of most operating systems:

In order to underscore the role that GPL’d software plays in our lives, we need to convey to people the idea that the GNU foundation is at the heart of all good software. To this end we need to use the following names:

• All IBM Products will be called “Prison/DOS”
• FreeBSD will be called “GNU/FreeBSD”
• OpenBSD will be called “GNU/OpenBSD”
• No, SERIOUSLY, call it GNU/Linux!  Stop laughing at me!  I mean it!
• OSX has been heavily influenced by free software.  It should be called GNU.5/OSX.  
• Windows will be called “Spawn of Satan”.

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