'Twas the night before Gav-Mas, when all through the house
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;
The hackers begrudgingly used vim and ed;
While visions of software danced in their heads;
Mamma with UNIX, and I with my VAX,
Had just tried to compile a working termcap.
When on tty0 there arose such a clatter,
I checked the syslog to hunt down the hacker.
Switching to tty0 in a flash,
It looked as though the kernel would crash.
The text from the terminal's soft amber glow,
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,
With a scruffy old hacker so lively and quick,
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:
Now gzip, now icecat, now elisp and Emacs!
On Trisquel, on gNewSense, on GNU plus Linux!
Freedom Zero, Freedom One, Freedoms Two and Three!
To modify, run, and share as you please!
From over the net, the programs did fly,
And then he mounted my main system drive;
Within a few minutes, the system was GNU
Binaries, scripts, and source code too—
And then as I watch, amazed and aloof
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.
Dressed in khaki and red, and covered in soot,
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 eyes—how they twinkled! his dimples, how merry!
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;
A disk drive he placed on his head like a wreath,
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.
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
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;
He spoke not a word, but let out a smirk,
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.
The free software song he sang with a whistle,
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!”