The good example of a bad description

In the Portuguese channel SIC (yeah, I know…), there is mini-show in the daily news that’s called “Futuro Hoje” – Future Today – where they talk about technology. OK, the idea is fine until the point where they have no idea what they’re talking about. Of course sooner or later they’d have to talk about Free Software and they did and that’s why I am writing this text. Since they have no clue about what the FOSS model is, they start the video (for non-Portuguese speakers) saying “How internet can spare you hundreds of euros…” and they introduce the amazing Google docs. It’d be OK but then they start to talk about how powerful OpenOffice is, so much so for the internet sparing money…

After all the introducing talk they *try* to use a metaphor to tell people how FOSS works and it results in the most recent idiotic scene I saw on national TV: – They get a journalist who talks about vehicles to make an analogy between a car and free software. He starts to say that many people like to know every single part in their cars and change the oil themselves and have a lot of work which is, in his ignorant words “like free software works”; but there’s also people who pay for others to do all the work and that’s “the comfort of the commercial software”. Are these wise words or what? I don’t know if I laugh or if I get angry after watching such example of ignorance… All the story has a footer saying “Freeware ; Free programs as an alternative to piracy”, OK, I guess I’ll laugh.

So, concluding here’s an algorithm on “How to make a good example of a bad free software description”: “

`import google_examples;
import clueless_cars_journalist;
import geek_wannabe_tech_magazine_editor;

show_google_and_beryl_videos();
geek_wannabe_tech_magazine_editor.start_talking();

clueless_cars_journalist.start_clueless_talking();
clueless_cars_journalist.start_delusion();

google_examples.show_more_google_stuff();

``for every_frame_of_video{
add_stupid_footer("Freeware");
}
`

And here’s the famous video: