Geek Dreams

For some people who play this game, the symbolism of the penguin might not be understood. Tux is the mascot for the Linux operating system and happens to be a penguin. Linux is an open source operating system, which as a programmer is a trend I would like to see. I suppose that I could have just as easily chosen to go with Beastie, the FreeBSD mascot, but daemons might give people the wrong idea. Besides, when I release my work as open source, I tend to use the GPL license.

To me, open source is about letting go of the code that I write so that others can benefit from my work. I am still fairly old-school as I tend to only open source my work after it has been on my site for a while. My Dozen Days of xxx series has been open source from the day episodes are released, though. As I work on larger scale projects, I may start releasing libraries (under an MIT license) while keeping the core code closed source for a few years.

The death of the BSoD reflects my hope that open source would make inroads on the desktop. This never happened. However, on the smart-phone front Android - which is built on top of Linux - has significant market share. I suppose one could also argue that Apple’s iOS is built on top of BSD so the kernal is arguably open. Interesting update, WebOS has also been released as open source.

As with all my start of the day dream episodes, this one foreshadows the next day. The lava is a symbolism of the fires of hell. Hell is, in my mind at least, the worst that things can get. The theme behind one of those weeks was that it is always possible for a situation to get worse but if you keep trying eventually things will work out in the end. My life has been full of many ups and downs recently, but I am still developing games in my spare time so I am still holding on to my dreams.