| wIndependence Day Essay: On Redmond Wood and Linux |
by Jose V. Ferro, Jr. (July 11, 2002)
I'm a carpenter who likes to play with wood. I do carvings of little toys for my kids, make cabinets, chairs, tables and little doodads for my wife, and do the occasional sculpting with wood. I learned how to carve wood from forests which Bill G owns, who owns Redmond forest where his trees came from. 15 years of buying wood from Bill, I had no problems with Bill. I learned to carve slowly and surely by learning from other people who learned to carve in the local woodworkers union.
We loved looking at the wood, seeing what new and cool things we can do with it, and occasionally turning out the useful thing that makes my wife happy like rocking chairs, or toys that keeps my kids and some adults alike amused for hours. We kept on buying the wood from Bill, because, really he was the only person we knew who sold that kinda wood we use. We've heard of people, though, who took Bill's seeds and made their own forests out of Bill's trees . . . We don't buy from them, my mentor calls them Pirates.
Recently, I've been having problems. Bill, who's been our sole source of Redmond trees these past 15 years has been getting a little bit weird. We can't buy wood when we choose anymore, we pay for the right to get better wood for the next five years. This all seems far more expensive than what we're used to. Time was, we can buy wood and that would be fine for us for 2-5 years without buying a new supply. Now, if we want to buy wood from him, we don't just buy the wood, we buy the rights to get better wood for 5 years. What fool ever thought of that idea? We complained and complained and one of his sons called Balls, said that they were going through that hokey plan anyways, because they studied and decided that was best for them? Also, they keep saying that whatever we made out of the trees he sold to us were his bloody property. Would you believe that? If I bought his wood that came from his trees, he says that he owns every little thing I create out of that little gosh darn piece of wood. If I make a little toilet outta that piece of tree, Bill owns it, and he has the right to say, "Hey, you made that outta my forest so that's mine . . . "
Anyhow, I could clearly see that buying from Bill was getting to be a bad idea, also very impractical, if ever I wanted to feed my kids and send them to school. So I started asking around the woodcutters around and they had rumblings of a person who was selling trees in a totally different way. This guy was named Linus. They said his kinda wood was far better than Bills, according to those guys who really knew their business. He didn't only have one kinda tree in the forest, but all kinds of different trees we can use to do our carvings on. The different kinds of trees were called Mandrake, Caldera, Lycoris, and a whole buncha other stuff. The weird thing about this was Linus and all the people who owned all this kinda trees encouraged us to get their seeds from the trees and grow our own types of their trees as long as we can make it available to all the villages around. You know what the most amazing thing was? We don't pay for the trees, we pay Linus, and all the people who sells the kinds of different trees only for asking how to take care of the trees, keeping it healthy and all. Damned if that this sounded crazier than Bills idea. I mean, how will the heck will they make money then? Well, according to people in Newsforge Tavern, some of them actually made money that way and were actually getting richer and richer outta that!!
Imagine . . . all those free stuff and they were giving it away! Anyhow, I got some wood sold by a merchant store called Mandrake and damn it to heck if it wasn't pretty good material! It was solid, no insects at all in the wood, unlike Bills, and whenever I carved something out of the wood, it was sure never to rot or break easily unlike Bill's material. I still can't believe they give it away for free, much less let me give away seeds from their own forests for my friends. Sheeez, Bill would have coniptions if ever he did that with his own trees.
Now, let me ask you, after listening to my story, which person would you buy your wood from? The crazy guy who wants you to pay for sub-standard wood, which has lotsa insects, no matter how many times they say they are insect free, tells you to pay for the right to purchase wood from them for 5 years, and says that every thing you make outta their wood is actually theirs? Or from the crazy guy who wants to give his seeds away, lets you make your own trees outta his, has fewer if any insects in their trunks, solid as all hell, and tells you that you gotta show other people how you make the stuff that you love to do to make other people happy, like toys, chairs, tables, and all that kinda stuff you make outta wood? Heck I know where I'm sticking to, I hope most of you out there are smart enough make the right choice, which seems to me to be obvious as all heck. According to the woodcarving union, Bill sells his expensive yet poorly made wood to almost all the people around the world while Linus has sells his wood to around 5 villages outta hundred. Sure, more people uses Bill's wood, but that's going to change in a while, I know it. I mean, sooner or later, people are going to take the fact that when you sit on a chair that's made from Bill's wood.. it's gonna break like a twig in less than a year. With Linus's stuff, heck my Auntie Rhea who weighs 300 pounds can sit on a Linus chair for days and days and that chair will NEVER break. Well, of course unless she eats first, but then that's a different story.
About the Author: The author is from the Philippines, is grateful to the Philippine local user group for helping him 'kick the Windows habit' (Hello, fellow PLUGer's!). Mr. Ferro has been using Linux-Mandrake 8.2 on the desktop at home and at work for a year and half -- ever since he discovered the beauty of perl, python, emacs and xkill, and kinda likes OS X (hey, it runs python scripts flawlessly!. Mr. Ferro is pleased to see, from seeing his essay chosen, that Linux geeks have a weird sense of humor.
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Please note: The opinions expressed in this essay are those of the writer, not of the management or staff of DesktopLinux.com.
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