Not to be confused with
BSD/Linux sectarian violence. It's more of a
gedankenexperiment. What if...
Act 1 - Scene 1
Maxi-sized software companies, feeling threatened by the increasing prevalence of Open Source software, launch a concerted set of legal attacks on the GPL and BSD licenses in an attempt to bring open source code into the private sphere.
Act 1 - Scene 2
The Open Source community is subject to much wailing and gnashing of teeth. ("Alderaan is peaceful -- we have no weapons...")
Act 2 - Scene 1
unix.girl, plucky C coder and writer of free parallel port device drivers, wanders the streets despairing for the fate of her coding community. She encounters bag lady, rummaging through a dumpster, muttering about audio compression algorithms. It's Eileen Richardson, former CEO of Napster and legal pariah, hounded into seclusion by record company lawsuits and restraining orders that prevent her from coming within 50 feet of digital storage devices. The unix.girl finds in her a kindred spirit, an intellectual property refugee. They agree to join forces.
Act 2 - Scene 2
Unix.girl creates a roll-yer-own superweapon on an MkLinux Centris 610 and calls it IP_kill. It has the power to sow confusion amongst her enemies, but how to deploy it?
Act 3 - Scene 1
In a daring act of self-sacrifice, Eileen Richardson resurrects the long-dormant Napster code, including in the installation a set of distributed computing .dll's designed to turn the computers of millions of teen MP3 fans into a giant Beowulf cluster running IP_kill. Just as the software is delivered to millions of unsuspecting fans, she is stung to death by a swarm of PolyGram/EMI lawyers disguised as killer bees.
Act 3 - Scene 2
The resulting legal carnage results in the destabilization of intellectual property, where the ownership of everything from Windows 2000 to the Bible lives in a state of legal flux for years. Unix.girl goes home to put the finishing touches on an RPM to support the latest parallel Zip drive.
THE END(?)