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from the HUMANS-NEED-FANTASY-TO-BE-HUMAN dept.
Pratchett’s 33rd Discworld novel, Going Postal, tells of the creation of an internet-like system of communication towers called “the clacks”. When John Dearheart, the son of its inventor, is murdered, a piece of code is written called “GNU John Dearheart” to echo his name up and down the lines. “G” means that the message must be passed on, “N” means “not logged”, and “U” means the message should be turned around at the end of a line. (This was also a realworld tech joke: GNU is an open-source operating system, and its name stands, with recursive geek humour, for “GNU’s not Unix”.) The code causes Dearheart’s name to be repeated indefinitely throughout the system, because “A man is not dead while his name is still spoken."
What better way to remember the beloved inventor of this fictional system, then, than “GNU Terry Pratchett”? Reddit users have designed a code that anyone with basic webcoding knowledge can embed into their own websites (anyone without basic webcoding knowledge can use the plugins for Wordpress and other platforms). The code is called the XClacksOverhead, and it sets a header reading “GNU Terry Pratchett”. “If you had to be dead,” thinks a character in Going Postal, “it seemed a lot better to spend your time flying between the towers than lying underground.” And so Pratchett is, in a way.
Source The Guardian
Reddit link with suggested code mod here.
(Score: 5, Informative) by prospectacle on Thursday March 19 2015, @02:43AM
Oh goody, semantics.
Since you wish to be so precise, you might be interested to know that you're wrong.
It's true that open source software isn't always free software.
But free software (adhering to Stallman's four freedoms) is always open source software.
For the proof, see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html [gnu.org]
Specifically, freedom 1 (the second freedom):
The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
So being "open source" as described in freedom 1, is a necessary but not sufficient condition, to qualify as "free software".
GNU, being free, is therefore open source.
"...were Richard Stallman to hear you claim that GNU is Open Source..." he would likely point out the problems he sees with the term "Open Source" and how it's used to distract from true software freedom, as is his wont. That's because it encompasses only one of the four distinct freedoms he's interested in.
If a plan isn't flexible it isn't realistic