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Юмор в стиле Open Source

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Несмотря на устоявшиеся представления о том, что приверженцы Open Source — унылые красноглазики, в лишний раз убедился в адекватности и позитивности настроя лидеров этого движения. Краткая предыстория такова:
  • у нас есть маленькая Open Source-компания, генеральный директор сейчас занят разработкой весьма нетривиального робота для скачивания и обработки интернет-сайтов на C++;
  • в связи с этим мы над ним давно шутим в стиле «хватит уже изобретать свой велосипед, когда для этого есть wget»;
  • несколько дней назад в сети появилось объявление нынешнего разработчика Wget о том, что он собирается прекратить разработку и ищет себе преемника;
  • на днях у нашего директора случился день рождения;
  • мы решили подшутить над ним, попросив автора Wget написать ему письмо с предложением стать мэйнтейнером Wget вместо того, чтобы продолжать писать своего робота.


Результат не заставил себя ждать:


From: Dmitry Shurupov <..>
To: Micah Cowan <..>
Subject: Request for helping in making little prank
Date: 15.01.2010 15:08

Hello, Micah!

Some days ago, I've seen a news concerning your intention to stop developing GNU Wget. Also, it was written that you're trying to find a new maintainer for this classical FLOSS project.

I'm from Russian startup TrueOffice that specializes in Open Source integration. And we have a strange funny request for you. Our company's CEO, Dmitry Stolyarov, is busy with developing a complicated Web crawler on C++. This project made us to mock at him saying that what he is developing now was realized in «wget -r» for years.

Tomorrow (this Saturday), our CEO celebrates his birthday. What we want is to make a prank on him with your help. Is it possible for you to send him a fake email telling that he's a good claimant to become a GNU Wget maintainer (instead of developing his own C++ Web crawler)? We would appreciate a lot your help in this fun.

His email is as follows: Dmitry Stolyarov <..>.

Hope, you'll understand our funny request right and would be so kind to help us with this prank. Thanks in advance.

From Soviet Russia with love :-)


Dmitry Shurupov,
Chief Technology Officer,
TrueOffice
www.trueoffice.ru

From: Micah Cowan <..>
To: Dmitry Stolyarov <..>
Subject: GNU Wget Maintainer
Date: 16.01.2010 10:49

Hello Mr Stolyarov,

My name is Micah Cowan. Until recently, I was the maintainer of the
widely used command-line web utility, GNU Wget
(http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/). Last weekend, I announced that I
am stepping down from that role (you can see the announcement here:
lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-wget/2010-01/msg00009.html).

This being the case, the GNU Wget project is looking for a new
maintainer. I am very interested to learn that you yourself have been
working on a tool in C++, whose functionality is exactly equivalent to
that of GNU Wget. To my mind, this makes you the ideal candidate to
step in as Wget's new maintainer.

Since you've written your tool in C++, and Wget is written in C,
they're in basically the same langauge… you could probably just plop
your code right into Wget and get the best of both worlds. Better yet,
in Wget's source code you won't find any awkward things like

for (std::vector<std::string>::const_iterator i = s.begin();… )

since Wget's C source code doesn't have all those complicated C++
structures that can make the code so messy sometimes.

If you're interested in thinking about this, have a look at the GNU
Maintainer's page (http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html) to
see what would be expected of you in a maintainer's capacity; please
also see the Wget «Wgiki» (http://wget.addictivecode.org/) for lots of
helpful information about Wget.

In any case, have a happy birthday! I look forward to hearing your answer.

— Yours,
Micah J. Cowan
micah.cowan.name

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