[Nolug] Open Source Christmas

Open Source Christmas?

by Matthew Langham
Dec. 23, 2002

T'was the night before Christmas, when suddenly Rudolf stormed through
the door of Santa's office to find him buried in his new iBook. "Damn
WIFI is down again", Santa mumbled, "I can't post anything to my new
weblog."

Rudolf used the break in Santa's surfing to launch into his well
prepared speech. "You know Santa, I've been thinking about this whole
Christmas project thing. Maybe we should be looking at open sourcing the
project – what do you think?"
"Open sourcing Christmas?", Santa nearly leapt out of his chair, "you
must be joking. Why would I want to do that?"

Rudolf had prepared his arguments well. "First, if we open source
Christmas then we can start building a real community around it. You
could be project lead and I would be a committer. You know, there are
lots of people who don't like Christmas or can't seem to get in the
spirit. If we make the whole thing open source then people could get
involved. And we can get people to write new documentation for the
project. The documentation we have seems to be a little out of date."

"What would people want an open source Christmas for?" Santa was trying
hard to follow.
"Well, they could change bits they don't like. Like for instance perhaps
people would prefer Christmas to be in say Summer, instead of Winter. Or
have a flexible Christmas depending on which hemisphere you live in. Or
perhaps they would prefer you to come through the front-door instead of
down the chimney. You know that sort of thing. If Christmas was open
source then the community could vote on things they would like to
change. Maybe we can even get other festivity projects to merge with the
Christmas project – wouldn't that be great."

Santa gazed out of the window of his office for some time. "You know
Rudolf", he said after a while, "this open source idea is not bad.
Really. But there might be a couple of drawbacks. What if the community
decides it doesn't need a Santa to bring the presents. What if they
decide that some Brad Pitt lookalike would be better? And as to Rudolf
and the other reindeers pulling my sleigh, what if they decide that Brad
should arrive driving say the new BMW?"

Rudolf paused for a moment. "Ah, yes, I hadn't thought about that. Ok.
So, when do we leave?". "Soon, Rudolf, soon.", smiling to himself, Santa
went back to his weblog.

Happy Holidays.

Matthew Langham leads the open source group at S&N AG in Paderborn,
Germany. When he has time he also writes about open source and emerging
technologies. Matthew is the co-author of a New Riders book on the
Apache open source project, Cocoon.

SOURCE: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/2473

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Received on 12/24/02