Spread Firefox Contest Open Sourced



I went over to visit some friends to write a song for the Spread Firefox contest. When I got to their house, I pulled up the Spread Firefox contest page and saw that the contest accepts videos, but not songs.

"That's okay," I told my friends. "We can just open source the rules to the contest. It makes sense for the Spread Firefox campaign to use songs, so we're going to compose a song anyway."

Here's our song below. If anyone else would like to submit a song to the Spread Firefox campaign, you can send me a link to your song and I'll include it here -- that is, until the Mozilla Foundation expands the contest to accept songs. Then submit songs directly to them.

Here is a short MP3 snippet of our song.

The full song can be downloaded as an MP3 format torrent (3.1 megs) from here and as an Ogg format torrent (5 megs) from here. (The Ogg format of the song sounds clearer. As they say, let freedom ring. You can listen to the Ogg format of the song using the free Audacity sound recording and editing program.)

If you don't already have BitTorrent software on your computer, you can download it from the BitTorrent web page.

Gracious thanks to Prodigem for making it so easy to create and seed torrrent files. And thanks are owed to Apple Computer for making its GarageBand software such a delight to use. We were literally playing (as the in the verb "to play") in composing this song.

When we finished recording this song, I turned to my friends and asked, "Are we allowed to have this much fun entering a contest?" They laughed and replied, "Yes, we're allowed to have this much fun."

I'd Like to Teach the World a Browser


I'd like to teach the world a browser,
And change them one by one.
I'd like to show them freedom's face,
And show them how it's done.

I'd like to open up the source,
And spread it far and wide.
From cityscapes, to suburban sprawl,
Throughout the countryside.

Refrain:

It's the better browser,
It's good news all around.
With extensions, themes, the Mozilla team,
Firefox wins hands down.

I'd like to give the world a chance,
To open up their minds,
I'd like to take them traveling,
To see what they could find.

I'd like to boot the spyware good,
Send it packing far away,
To ne'er return,
Be always spurned.
"Goodbye, goodbye," I say.

Refrain:

It's the better browser,
It's good news all around.
With extensions, themes, the Mozilla team,
Firefox wins hands down.

I'd like to cross the platform gaps,
and join them all as one.
It's time for all our differences,
to be completely done.

I dream a day, not far from now,
When unity is here.
With blessed times,
No pop-up signs.
And all hold freedom dear.

Refrain:

It's the better browser,
It's good news all around.
With extensions, themes, the Mozilla team,
Firefox wins hands down.


Words and musical arrangement by Phil Shapiro and the Front Porch Singers (2005).
Music composed by Roger F. Cook, Roger Greenaway, and Billy Davis. (1971)

The above song was recorded in GarageBand on an iMac with two digitized audio tracks (voice and drums), a bass track and a strings track. The voice track includes acoustic guitar accompaniment. The chords for this song are D, Em, A, G, D.

The origins and history of the original song can be found in the American Memory archive at the Library of Congress.

If you would like to, you can Digg the above news story here.