malformed.org does the blog thing

According to slashdot, there’s an open source ipod brewing. I can’t see how this will end well.

If there actually were one, a few things would come of it:

• They’ll find some way to confuse Backspace and Delete on their open source iPod
• You’ll download new music and if the music was made after 1999 it will bitch about an incompatible libc
• the open source ipod’s user interface would “lose focus” randomly, causing it to erase the wrong files
• the open source ipod would have 525 screensavers. the remainder of the available space would hold 3 mp3s
• That RMS asshole would insist on somehow working the word “GNU” into the name of the new open source ipod
• There would be a big fight over whether to use the creative commons license or whether to use the GPL on the open source iPod and the code base would fork. Many flame wars. GNU/boring
• the open source ipod would have Unique Errors, one per person, guaranteed to have no previous results on google
• They’d use ext3 as the filesystem for the iPod, at every boot it would do a filesystem integrity check and start throwing up prompts to the user as to whether to fix particular inodes
• When you use the rewind button on the open source iPod it just prints a bunch of Ctrl-H characters on the screen
• the open source ipod will have a root prompt, but no keyboard interface
• the open source ipod will support appletalk, ipv6, and XNS, very, very well
• It will insist on having Perl 5.8, and will support internationalization by refusing to print anything in English
• it will come with uucp by default. no one will know why.
• No version of it will ever actually be “stable”
• instead of the included note saying “Don’t steal music”, it will say “Never buy anything”
• They’ll blatantly rip off the iPod interface and then act all hurt when Apple sends them a C&D
• They’ll find some goddamned way to make the acronym for the device self-referential, and maybe throw in a Monty Python reference for good measure, just to emphasize what rich social lives they all have.
• It will have lots of funny quotes it took from other people on IRC