How to Explain the GPL to the Lay

Next to my office is the secretary office. Helen, one of the secretaries there just came over.

"Hi, Dee came by and was criticizing me" she said. "What for?" I asked. "For my use of Word to send out the company news letter. She said it was much easier to do that in something called Open Office. Do you know what that is?"

Yes, that's right ladies and gentlemen. Dee has started her crusade for free software, as I feared. This brings up the question on how one can explain the lay why Free Software Fundamentalists are the scum of the earth. Here was my attempt, send me your suggestions if you have any.

Here's why you shouldn't Open Office. There are two main reason, the first being that it's crappy software. It is not better than Microsoft Office. It was written by people with no social life, in their spare time, which, clearly, they have a lot. They were not paid for it, so the software simply sucks.

Open Office is Free Software. The people who create this kind of software, I call them Free Software Fundamentalists, like to kill puppies.



They believe that all software should be free. Not just the software that you can actually run, but also its source code. As you may know, software is written in text that is then compiled to 1's and 0's that the computer can understand, this text is called the software's source code. These Free Software Fundamentalists believe that anybody should have this source code so they can do whatever you like with it.

That seems nice at first, until you realize that the source code for mosquito-killing robots could then be easily modified so that these robots become puppy-killing robots. Free Software Freaks want to kill puppies.

Free software is also viral. Much of it contains the so-called GPL virus. What this virus does is make all software that meets also free. That means that if a puppy-killing robot meets a nuclear bomb, that bomb also gets contaminated with the GPL virus. Of course, the bomb will then start to blow itself up in order to kill puppies and before you know it the whole world blows up.

That's why you should never use Free Software.