[Update: If you're getting here from theserverside.com, then you might also be interested in this post.]

[Question: Was Marc just kidding? I'm not familiar enough with him to be able to tell. Either way, I think this post is pretty god damn funny, so I'm keeping it.]

Although you probably won't believe it after you finish reading this, I would like it to be known that I like open source software as well as MS's competitors' products. I like Java - If .NET hadn't come along, I'd still be coding with it regularly. My last web site ran on Linux and was built with open source tools. I own a PowerBook. I run Linux on two of my PCs. I wrote a textbook for a local vocational school on Linux. I did it for very little money. I liked it.

However, my enjoyment of these things is nothing compared to my distaste for people who badmouth MS and its proponents out of hand.

It was, then, with great interest that I read Marc Canter's post, pointed to by Scoble and Jim, titled "How to suck up to Microsoft - 10 easy lessons."

So, this is my response to Marc's post - Let's just call it "How to become a pompous open source dickhead in 10 easy lessons":

1. Start a project on that digital graveyard of forgotten software called "SourceForge" - Give it a recursive acronym for a name, and ensure that it never gets beyond version 0.0.6. Invite all your friends to contribute. Produce a few paragraphs of documentation in three different languages and then forget about it.

2. Email all your friends to tell them about how much you hate Outlook and how you think its design is incredibly poor - unusable, even. Make sure that you send the email from Ximian Evolution.

3. Buy "Teach Yourself C in 21 Days," spend three hours getting "Hello world" to compile, and then get really excited the next day when you're telling your friends about how cool it is that Apache is open source and than anybody can just drop into the code to fix a problem. Then spend the rest of your life trying to put your money where your mouth is after learning that, wow, this coding stuff is actually kind of hard, and maybe you were wrong when you said that if grandma didn't like her blatant Photoshop clone that she could just change the bits she didn't like, recompile, and be on her way.

4. Show up for a user group meeting in a Honda, Red Hat distro in hand, wearing your Nikes, eating Doritos, and drinking Coke. Then proceed to talk about how much market dominance makes you sick and how much you want to “stick it to The Man.“ Pat yourself on the back for being such a trooper, light up a Marlboro, and kick back in your Levis - You've earned it!

5. Without having an understanding of security, tell everybody you meet that Linux is always more secure than Windows (I've got money that says you're running SendMail on the out of box install of Red Hat that you did (I've got more money where that came from that says you couldn't disable SendMail if your life depended on it)).

6. Every time you mention that you're running this MS OS or that MS product, apologize for it and fail to realize that you're probably spending 90% of your time using an OS that you claim to hate.

7. Always write "MS" as "M$" and completely fail to comprehend that people would write "Sun" as "$un" if it could get off its ass and make something that people actually wanted to buy (Note that I'm not including Sun in the open source world - but I find that Java and open source OSs often go hand-in-hand).

8. Talk about what a bad user experience Windows provides, and about how it's too complicated for most users. You're right about this, and it's only a matter of time before the rest of the world wakes up to the fact that there are serious advantages to having software that's been coded against five different windowing toolkits, and that the location of applications in the "This-isn't-just-an-obvious-ripoff-of-the-Start-menu" menu change completely from distro to distro, and even change drastically from different versions of the same distro. If anybody tries to tell you that you're wrong, just say "nuh-uh" and don't bother to form any sort of a rational argument.

9. Praise Apple whenever possible. Talk about how you think Windows is way too expensive, and that $129.00 for a copy of OS X is much more reasonable. Nothing says "cheap" like a $3,000 PowerBook that's going to be obsolete in a few months. Apple's really cool, but their stuff isn't cheap, and it isn't exactly open, either.

10. Criticize Microsoft for making money. Obviously, the $24,000,000,000 that the Gates Foundation has slated for charity is unimportant. Taking vaccines away from children in Africa is obviously a small price to pay for getting to compile your word processor before you use it so that you can feel 'leet about your software experience. The African children who will now get Polio don't mind a bit, right? I mean, you're happy and healthy, so who cares about them?

Sorry if I seem a little angry tonight. My neighbors are playing loud country music, and I've been drinking warm salt water through my nose all night in an attempt to stop a cold.

These things get to you, you know?