[humorix] Microsoft Finds Perfect Solution To Beat Linux

[James Baughn <jbaughn@ldd.net>]

Microsoft Finds Perfect Solution To Beat Linux
May 19, 2003

REDMOND, WA -- Forget SCO, the real threat to the future of
Open Source lies in Bill Gates' multi-billion dollar bank
account. Utilizing assets that only the world's richest
person can tap into, Chairman Gates has registered
trademarks and domain names for virtually every combination
of letters and numbers that could conceivably be used for
free software projects.

"If you thought the flamewar over Firebird was intense,
just wait until we file lawsuits against everybody from
AAAAAAAAA to ZZZZZZZZZ," explained one of Bill Gates'
favorite lawyers.

Thanks to the US Patent and Trademark Office's new
Frequent Squatter Program, Bill Gates was able to register
billions of trademarks at only a fraction of the usual
rate. Meanwhile, thanks to Network Solution's "Buy 1,000
Domains, Get 1 Free" promotion, Gates had no difficulty
snatching a whole portfolio of .org, .net, .com, and even
.gov domains.

"I don't know why we didn't think of this sooner," boasted
Gates' personal delivery truck driver who helped transport
2,156 tons of paperwork to the USPTO offices in Washington,
D.C.  "What will geeks do when they have an itch to scratch
but the shortest open source project name available is
Aw0jsl-256qplg-zzzlp09dax?  The war is over.  Microsoft
wins."

A spokesperson for the Mozilla G59-delta-Gremlin project
(formerly known yesterday as PintoX, the day before as
Canyonero L7, last week as Firebird, and last month as
Phoenix) said, "This is an outrage! Project namespace
collisions have already become the single most contentious
flamewar topic, even surpassing GNOME vs. KDE!  And now all
of the money we've sheepishly given to Microsoft over the
years is being used against us!"

As a stopgap measure, Larry Wall pointed out that Microsoft
only registered names with characters in the set
[a-zA-Z0-9-].   "Gates has only defiled a negligible
portion of the Unicode character space," Wall said.  "If
push comes to shove, we can all just adopt post-modern
project names using mathematical symbols, Greek letters, or
the Klingon alphabet.

He added, "Or we could take a plain English name and run it
through MD5.  How about f83a0aa1f9ca0f7dd5994445ba7d9e80?
...Uh oh, I see Gates has already registered that.  Well,
Perl sounds better anyway."

Slashdot's Taco Boy was watching the Matrix sequel for the
16th time hoping to catch a glimpse of the ssh screenshot
and was therefore unavailable for comment at press time.


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