Conversation

"I use Linux as my operating system," I stated proudly to the unkempt, bearded man. He swiveled around in his desk chair with a devilish gleam in his eyes, ready to mansplain with extreme precision. "Actually," he said with a grin, "Linux is just the kernel. You use GNU+Linux!" I don't miss a beat and reply with a smirk: "I use Alpine, a distro that doesn't include the GNU coreutils, or any other GNU code. It's Linux, but not GNU+Linux."

The smile quickly drops from the man's face. His body began convulsing, he foamed at the mouth, and he dropped to the floor with a sickly thud. As he writhed around he screamed, "I-IT WAS COMPILED WITH GCC! THAT MEANS IT'S STILL GNU!" In a cool fashion, I replied "if Windows was compiled with GCC, would that make it GNU?"

With a sickly wheeze, the last of the man's life was ejected from his body. He lied on the floor, cold and limp. I've womansplained him to death.