WASHINGTON — In a move that sent shockwaves through the tech industry, former President Donald Trump signed an executive order today declaring all open-source code "un-American" and making its creation, distribution, or use punishable by up to 20 years in federal prison. "Nobody knew code could be free. It's terrible, folks. Terrible," Trump declared from his Mar-a-Lago residence. "Real Americans pay for their software, and they pay big league. That's what made this country great." The controversial order, scrawled in gold Sharpie on the back of a McDonald's receipt, specifically targets what Trump called "socialist programmer communes" like GitHub and Linux. It requires all software to be developed behind closed doors and sold at "whatever price the market can bear, plus 50%." Tech industry leaders were quick to respond, with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella reportedly doing backflips in his office while shouting "Windows forever!" Meanwhile, Linux creator Linus Torvalds was last seen attempting to seek political asylum in Finland, muttering something about "git push" and "force shutdown -h now." The order has created particular confusion in the government sector, where thousands of federal websites running on open-source software suddenly became illegal. The White House's own website temporarily displayed a blue screen of death with the message "ERROR: FREEDOM.EXE NOT FOUND." "This is a great day for American software," said Trump's newly appointed Chief of Proprietary Code Enforcement, a sentient copy of Windows Vista. "We're going to make coding great again by putting it behind the biggest, most beautiful paywalls you've ever seen." At press time, a underground resistance movement of developers had already formed, sharing code snippets via an elaborate network of Morse code signals sent through reprogrammed coffee makers.
I can get behind this criticism and admit that I felt mostly the same. I figured that either OP didn't flesh out their narrative and just kept proposing more headlines and bylines. Or, they used an LLM.
I'd like to hope that this OP put OC in the UI, you see? Either way, the thing I most appreciate about this post is that they tried. I like the idea of people sharing their harvest from their own onion trees, it makes for a nice little onion amuse-bouche.
The fact that they began with closing open-source as the premise, and Trump's penchant for making up words and definitions that prove he doesn't know anything, I was hoping that somewhere in there would have been a quote like:
Side note: the crazy juxtaposition of your headlines made your spoof and satire examples that much more funny. "Re-Hires McRib Sandwich" made me cackle.