The Truth About GNU
From: chain@barn.COM (Charles Chain) Subject: The Real GNU conspiracy Date: 20 Jan 90 08:41:15 GMT After years of research, I have discovered that GNU is not an idealistic group of people promoting free software, but actually a conspiracy of disk drive and memory manufacturers. These bastions of free enterprise, always eager to supplement their sales of bigger and faster hard disks; as well as more and more memory, needed a good reason for this. People weren't buying disks fast enough for them, they said. So, back in 1978, they hatched a plan to create an excuse for deprived computer weenies to spend money on disks and memory. They saw the work being done at Duke and North Carolina, and they hatched a plan to cash in on this. By brainwashing a UC-Berkeley graduate student and a high school student, the concept of Usenet was put into position. These two became the first unwitting pawns in a game of market oversatuation. Usenet became very popular, and soon thereafter, every site reading news started requiring more and more disks to store messages, and more and more memory to batch and unbatch all news. The manufacturers celebrated with glee, especially since the recession of the early 80's marked the demise of many companies who were too ethical to sign up for the conspiracy. The manufacturers were happy, riding a wave of euphoria. But they knew they had better keep moving ahead to make sure that the the market never slacked. The next step was to find a tangental reason, completely unrelated to the first, that would help boost sales. Then the concept arose: a man so blinded by ideology that all attempts to rationalize would be fruitless, but also someone who could believably create a beast that was so large, so unwieldly, and so space-consuming, that it would be declared useful by sheer size. There had to be more than that; to keep it large, it bundled existing pieces back into itself, and there existed a constant flow of releases to the extent that keeping up would be a constant consumption. Stallman was invented. He clicked off perfectly, galvinizing people with his political diatribe, as well as enough code to convince anyone he was for real. It was believed, and EMACS rolled into GNU, becoming the spirit-of-the-age political computing disk consumer. It has worked well. This made the conspirators even more and more bold. Sales were booming, and their swagger suggested they could not be stopped. And they continued. Their next step was to branch out, stop thinking single machine sites, and more on distributed computing sites. They needed a system that would consume massive disk space, and be plausibly useful enough to require massive addition to memory to run reasonable. It needed to consume the disk space of GNU, but show a real increase of memory for constant use. Then the idea came: network window systems. Make the screens big, give them 8 bit color, or 24 bit color, use lots of fancy words for overlays, etc., make them feel a need for more memory. In desperation for a name, they called it X. Then they called it X11, taking advantage, once again, of the many-release idea of "updates," with a constant outporing of software. This, the manufacturers think, will carry us into the 90's.