(filk to: verses 1, 2, & 5 of "The Awefull Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles" from the musical Cats)
The OS developers, everyone knows,
Are proud and implacable, passionate foes,
With wars that erupt in great virtual blows.
Take the Open Source advocates -- you might expect
That within their own ranks they'd decide what's correct,
But with each distribution is born a new sect.
And they
The MS and Mac camps all twiddle their bits
With commercial development "SDK" kits
And huge support sites taking thousands of hits.
The cost and restrictions are all justified
By standardization of look and of feel
And ways that they're not reinventing the wheel.
So, empire building entirely aside,
For the sake of compatible code they take pride,
When the industry monolith won't be denied
And the marketing glossies know just what to hide.
But still they must
Now anyone writing an OS must credit
That down at some level their code is embedded.
And all this non-portable code must be written
With thread complications like joinin' and splittin'
And inline assembly to spice up the code,
And specialty switches to link, loc, and load.
Then test
Without rest
With a
Copyright 2001 Robin Hilp