SlashNOT

Reinhard Gantar writes:

Santa Cruz, CA. Yesterday a large flying object landed on Thompson Square in Santa Cruz. The passengers identified themselves as ambassadors from Zulu IV, an earth-like planet in a small solar system in Sagittarius, and they ceremoniously passed a gift for president Bush (an elaborately braid-knitted pullover made of nano-carbon fibers) with the words “I’m Klatuu. This is a gift for your president.”

After the ceremony, they turned to business, inquiring to meet Linus Torvalds, Guido van Rossum and Richard Stallman. As they explained in a press conference, the people of Zulu IV is plagued by an evil emperor who is also the CEO of the only manufacturer of software and has been consistently abusing his monopoly power in order to enslave the planet’s populace for more than two-hundred wardoks (about 700 earth-years).

“We can’t bear no more” said Hm, the spokes-person of Zulu IVs delegation. “The blackmailing, the taxes, the suppression, the deportations, the licenses, the protocol pollution, the blue screens of death squads… we will put an end to all that, but we have to empower our people with software they can control themselves. We need Linux, gcc, python, mySQL and sendmail to overthrow the ancient regime.”

Larry Wall, creator of the perl programming language, volunteered as abductee in order to teach the good use of perl on Zulu IV. Hm politely rejected the offer, explaining, that their alphabet has not enough characters to handle perl-code gracefully.