April 8th, 2009
Open Source Haggadah, chapter 1
Tonight starts the Jewish holiday of Passover, the story of the Hebrews’ supposed escape from slavery and exodus from Egypt. The story is told every year at a seder, in a tradition that takes the form of the youngest child asking four questions and the elders relating the story as told in the Old Testament, with plentiful commentary from rabbis of yore. Open source is something less than 3,500 years old but its origins may be getting a little musty to some of our younger brethren, so Perlow and I are offering an “open source Haggadah,” a retelling of the exodus from enslavement to liberation.
It’s an interactive Haggadah, so edits are welcome in comments.
Now there arose up a new king, who knew not Stallman. And he said unto the Microsofties, Behold the people of free software are more and mightier than we are . . . And Gates charges his people, saying, Every SDK that is written, thou shall cast into the trash and every API that is created, that you shall save alive.
And there was a man of the name of Linus and he labored to created a kernel, and he could no longer hide it, he put it in an ark of GNU and sent it down the Minix newsgroup. And the great professor Tanenbaum, he who had created Minix, went down to the newsgroup and lo, there was the kernel, but Tanenbaum scoffed and said that the kernel was weak because it was of a monolithic nature.
But Linus nursed the kernel and added to it many GNU programs that Stallman had nurtured and he shared the sources and called its name Linux and he said, because I drew it out of Minux.
