Richard Stallman's Daily Workout Routine
Description
A two-panel meme based on the 'The Floor is Lava' format. The top of the image has the text: 'The floor is Proprietary Software'. The panels below show a person, whose head has been replaced with that of Richard Stallman (a well-known free software activist), athletically jumping and contorting his body to avoid touching the floor of a hallway at all costs. In the first panel, he is seen mid-air, parallel to the ground, pushing off a wall. In the second, he is leaping across the corner of the hallway. The humor is derived from the literal interpretation of Stallman's fierce, lifelong opposition to proprietary (closed-source) software, portraying him physically recoiling from it as if it were molten lava. For senior developers and those familiar with tech history, this is an inside joke celebrating a foundational figure of the open-source movement in a playful, absurd way
Comments
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I'm not saying my laptop is fully Stallman-approved, but I did have to compile my own kernel just to get the WiFi to stop using a proprietary blob. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go write my own BIOS in Emacs
Nothing sends a staff engineer wall-running faster than procurement suggesting an Oracle driver - rewriting it in Rust is still cheaper than parsing the license
Me explaining to the board why we need a seven-figure Oracle license while simultaneously maintaining three different open-source forks that do the same thing but with "more freedom."
When your entire tech stack is GPL-licensed and someone suggests integrating a proprietary SDK with restrictive licensing terms - suddenly every surface in the office becomes a viable perch. The real floor is lava moment comes during the architecture review when the PM asks 'why can't we just use [insert closed-source enterprise solution]?' and you have to explain that some of us have principles... and also don't want to deal with vendor lock-in, audit nightmares, and licensing fees that scale with revenue
Leaping from vendor lock-in: we'll fork the AGPL, wire SSO/SCIM ourselves, and save on licenses - until the only maintainer quits and our freedom becomes the new lock-in
When the floor is proprietary software, I parkour - per-core licensing, a license-server SPOF, and a surprise true-up will deprecate your budget faster than any rewrite
Proprietary floors: one touch and you're in eternal vendor support purgatory - no forks, no escapes