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Hope He's Got Goggles (4/13/99)
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Those wacky MIT students are at it again... Only a couple of weeks after building iMacs out of Jell-O, they're back in the news for selling open source baked goods. According to a quick blurb on ZDNN, some students used Bill Gates' impending visit to the school as inspiration for creative fundraising. They camped outside the auditorium soon to be blessed with Gates' presence and set up shop selling "open source pies." While the media will cost you, the source code is free-- they're handing out the recipe for kitchen-bound developers to alter and improve.
Gates, whom many see as the very antithesis of the whole "free for all" open-source movement, is visiting the school to help celebrate the 35th anniversary of MIT's computer center. Recently Microsoft has been making some tentative noises about releasing their death-grip on the Windows source code and opening it up to outside developers. The Open Source Community, however, seems more than a bit suspicious about what they expect will be Microsoft's lukewarm and half-assed approach, if their open letter to the company is any indication. (Interestingly enough, several of the points in the letter could just as easily have been directed at Apple, who have left some pretty significant chunks of Mac OS X Server out of the whole Darwin thing so far.) Anyway, the idea of selling open source pies in preparation for a Gatesian visit appeals to us in a major way.
There's no word yet what group is getting the proceeds from the pies (we suspect it's SIPB), but we hope they make a bundle from this imaginative enterprise. Details are so sketchy, we're not even sure if Gates' visit is imminent or if it already happened-- but if his visit hasn't occurred yet, given his recent turbulent history with pies, someone should probably tell him that the student body is armed and dangerous. Heck, we wouldn't be surprised if several students are already hard at work modifying the open-source recipe-- not for better flavor, flakier crust, or longer shelf life, but for improved aerodynamics and heftier splatter factor. Hey, we wonder if anyone's working on flavor plug-ins for Blueberry, Grape, Lime, Tangerine, and Strawberry fillings?
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SceneLink (1463)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 4/13/99 episode: April 13, 1999: The Register continues to insist that Apple is working with Intel in preparation for ditching the PowerPC, though Steve Jobs claims it's "total fiction." Meanwhile, Diamond releases a very iMac-looking Rio, which is still not iMac-compatible, and those wacky MIT students are selling "open source pies" in preparation for a Bill Gates visit...
Other scenes from that episode: 1461: Fun With Chip Intrigue (4/13/99) The Register's recent assertion that Apple is hooking up with Intel to hedge their bets against a sudden horrible PowerPC death touched off a firestorm of debate. They claimed that the only thing preventing IBM and Motorola from just chucking the chip's development out the window was "contractual obligations," and that PowerPC's future is shaky enough for Apple to start forging alternate plans based on Intel's increasingly-late 64-bit Merced processor... 1462: Got The Look, Not The Port (4/13/99) We must admit, we're more than a little amused by Diamond's latest "special edition" Rio MPEG-3 player. The Rio is a solid-state unit about the size of a couple of PCMCIA cards stacked together that stores and plays MP3 music...
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