The following was written yesterday morning, mostly as I was driving to
work thinking about the recent Netscape open-source release (see
<http://www.mozilla.org/>.)  A few of the edges are still a little rough.
And of course now I have to ``filk'' the GPL...

============================== filk here ===========================
/begin{song}{DIYpl3}
/subtitle{Do It Yourself patch level 3}
/notice{Lyrics /copyright/ 1998 Stephen Savitzky.  All rights reserved.
         /ttto{Do It Yourself,} /copyright/ Bill Sutton.}
/category{computers, humor}
/key{C}
/created{19980401}
/license{Released under the FGPL}

   C
I went to buy some software, and they said six hundred bucks
           F                C               G7
For some bloated cruft from Microsoft, now that price really sucks
      C
So I looked out on the network, and, my friends, I'm here to say
      F                  C                 G7             C
That people write great software and then give the code away.

/begin{refrain}
    C
Oh, Oracle, Sun and Microsoft, Novell and SAP
      F              C                  G7
Make bloated buggy cruftware that they license for a fee.
      C                                                     F*
They make big bucks from software so they don't want me to say
      F                 C               G7             C
That software's always better when you give the code away.
/end{refrain}

First I had to have a kernel just to make my software run
This Finnish guy named Linus wrote a great one just for fun,
Multi-user, multitasking, virtual memory as well,
And best of all it's free because it's under GPL.

Next, compilers and utilities were what I had to get --
The Free Software Foundation has the best ones on the Net.
They say that GNU's Not Unix, and I know this must be true
'Cause the tech support is faster and the software's better too.

Then I had to have an interface with windows, fonts and mice
And high-speed graphics over local networks would be nice.
The old X Window System got its start at MIT;
If it's good enough for Unix then it's good enough for me.

Now I had to use the World Wide Web, well that's always been cheap;
Picking lynx, perl and apache didn't cost me any sleep.
Netscape's long been losing market share, but just sit back and wait:
It's been free and on the Internet since April '98.

Now I have my system running, not a byte was off the shelf;
It rarely breaks and when it does I fix the code myself.
It's stable, clean and elegant, and lightning fast as well,
And it doesn't cost a nickel, so Bill Gates can go to hell.

/end{song}
--
 /   Steve Savitzky   \ 1997 Pegasus Award winner: best science song--+   /__
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