Not a console was stirring, not even stdout;
The sockets were all kept open with care
In hopes that St. Ignucious soon would be there;
While visions of software danced in their heads;
Mamma with UNIX, and I with my VAX,
Had just tried to compile a working termcap.
I checked the syslog to hunt down the hacker.
Switching to tty0 in a flash,
It looked as though the kernel would crash.
Got brighter and brighter as the output would grow.
When what to my wondering eyes did appear,
But a dialect of lisp so strange and so queer,
I knew St. Ignucious was up to his tricks.
From his clever beguiling the software soon came,
As he whistled and shouted the programs by name:
On Trisquel, on gNewSense, on GNU plus Linux!
Freedom Zero, Freedom One, Freedoms Two and Three!
To modify, run, and share as you please!
And then he mounted my main system drive;
Within a few minutes, the system was GNU
Binaries, scripts, and source code too—
He surged through the modem, making a poof.
As I fanned out the smoke and turned around,
Through the modem St. Iggy came with a bound.
He curiously ate something off of his foot;
A bundle of software he had on his back,
And he looked like a peddler opening his pack,
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll sheepish grin was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard on his neck was as thick as the snow;
As he clenched a recorder between his front teeth.
He had a broad face and quite a large belly
That shook when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly.
And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself;
A wink of his eye and a cat|grep|awk|sed
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread;
Opened his yeeloong and went straight to work,
He hacked and compiled, though his yeeloong was slow,
He finished his work, then the socket was closed.
Then back through the modem he flew like a missile
But I heard him exclaim, ere he flew out of sight—
“Free Software for all, each and every byte!”