I was going to have Richard phoning 555-2368 in the last pane but I was informed this was way too obscure a reference.
No body photos from anybody yet. Ghost Bruce Perens was planned whether I had bodies or not, so that’s ok.
ELER t-shirts are in the pipeline. They’ll be black, with big cartoony text that will read “EVERYBODY LOVES ERIC RAYMOND” on the front with “(except me)” in smaller text underneath. They’ll probably cost around £10 or so, and I’ll donate some money from each to the FSF. That’s about 15 Euros, and about 827 dollars. If you’d be interested please drop me a quick line at eler@geekz.co.uk with what size you’d go for. Don’t send me credit card numbers or scanned-in money just yet, nothing is guaranteed. Just testing the water.
19 replies on “Bruce Perens Dead”
Maybe we’re just waiting for Netcraft to confirm it?
I think I get minus points for getting the reference immediately, but I see a great need for the t-shirts – that’s one sale at least…
I don’t get it. Well, I get the Ghostbusters reference (although I had to Google for “555-2368”), but the second part of the strip (the conversation between Bruce and RMS) is a mystery to me…
Don’t fear the obscure references. We have search!
RMS plays the flute too?
I think I’d prefer “except me” to be on the back — more suspense for the punchline that way.
I’ll stand up and be counted as another movie-trivia-ignorant geek to whom the last panels make perfect sense, but who doesn’t have the Ghostbuster’s number memorized. “Proton packs” are instant recognition.
Today on his blog ESR manages to make “free speech” into “sucide thinkers”, the “most important weapons of al-Qaeda and the rest of the Islamist terror network”. We must “recognize, condemn, and reject the suicide thinkers” — heaven knows we can’t just *tolerate* dissent here in this country. Gah.
Wow. I just read ESR’s “Microsoft’s Worst Nightmare” post. The man is further gone than I thought.
Or, should I say, our “sense organ”? There have to be several cartoons worth of material in that
posting alone.
Oh, it’s http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=209 I’m talking about.
Anyway if he’s wondering who bent his flute, perhaps this could shed some light on the matter: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/dancing.html (yep ESR doesn’t confine the funnies to his blog)
I like the Demi Moore ‘Ghost’ reference!
Oh my, how did we let this happen? I just read http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/dancing.html and have to agree Mr.Raymond is not of sound mind, who knows who he is ‘channeling’. I’m taking my gun to my next LUG meeting, if he’s the speaker I’m gonna be ready for him :-)
In a recent interview, ESR shocked a lot of people when he said, “We don’t need the GPL anymore.” Federico Biancuzzi recently contacted RMS, founder of the Free Software Movement and initial developer of the GNU system (the G in “GLAMP”), to talk about the past, the present, and the future of the GNU GPL. Among other things, they discussed the new clauses of the upcoming GPL version 3.
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/09/22/gpl3.html
Actually, I’m quite fond of Eric, despite his foibles… can I get a variant t-shirt?
GLAMP? Who the heck ever used the G?
It’s LAMP.
If I use BSD, lighttpd, Postgres and Ruby on Rails, am I still allowed to call it LAMP?
If anyone’s dented rms’s flute (the woodwind kind), I’d suspect ESR first: I’ve personally witnessed him denting his own flute (while giving some odd little dance of joy outside the @ party at Confrancisco).
I was appalled, but not nearly as much as when later that day I heard him play. It was pretty much what you’d expect out of someone with no formal training who’s been fiddling about for about 6 months, so it’s hard to believe he’s been tootling around since the 70s, as the link above would lead us to believe is when he was declared god of the flute by the mystical powers of the universe.
I’ve only heard rms on the krumhorn and the recorder (not at the same moment), so I’m unaware of his flauting…
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311-555-2368 is the number that was on every phone in the Bell System marketing photos. Very obscure geek reference. Almost as bad as Key 2135 and Motorola.