On Mon, Sep 15, 2003 at 08:03:50AM -0600, Evan McNabb wrote: > Q: What features or attributes of Linux led you to start using it and/or > influence you to continue using it? Please be specific and descriptive > as possible and as technical as you would like. > > Feel free to write as much (Halcrow) or as little as you want...
I get the subtle feeling that I should respond to this question.
My initial encounter with GNU/Linux was on the mission field in a
small town in southern Italy in 1998. Well, I never actually saw it
in action on a computer. I noticed a box in the window of a computer
store that I was passing by with a big red hat on it. I was curious,
since I considered myself fairly computer literate, yet I never heard
of this ``Red Hat Linux'' thing. I was intrigued that it was
important enough to put in a store window. I shrugged it off and kept
doing the missionary thing.
Upon returning to school in 2000, I landed a job in a research lab.
The lab was have HP-UX machines, and have x86 machines with some
flavor of GNU/Linux installed. The less experienced undergrads were
assigned to the yucky HP-UX machines, and the upper classmen and grads
had the privilege of using the cool GNU/Linux machines.
I was embittered by the blatant class separation, so I decided that I
would show them all by installing Red Hat Linux 6.2 on my own Pentium
133 machine at home. I networked it with my roommate's G4 using
AppleTalk. In my mind at the time, that was the coolest thing in the
world. I was instantly enamored.
I struggled a bit getting everything to work just right at first, and
so I brought my box in to the lab and asked some of the Ph.D. students
to help me get it all working. Paul Graham, to his everlasting
credit, spent over an hour working with me on getting it all set up.
I would frequently ask another Ph.D. candidate in the back of the lab
questions, and he would usually give me a mocking look and tell me to
RTFM. So I learned to RTFM. It was all cookies and cake from that
point on.
One day, this Ph.D. student looked at me and said something along the
lines of the following:
``So you just installed a bunch of Free Software. Congratulations.
Now what are you going to give back? You know that all this stuff was
written by someone somewhere. You can write code too, you know. Are
you just going to keep taking from the community, without giving
anything in return?''
I didn't know exactly what to say to that. It was true - a bunch of
people donated their time and effort to give me all this great
software. What was I going to do in return? How was I going to give
back to this community that gave so much to me?
With time, I started learning more about the history and culture of
the Free Software movement. I realized that it was much more than
just cool free (as in beer) software. This was an entirely unique
view of community and cooporation in the electronic frontier. The
Free Software movement allows people to share, help, develop, and
include anyone who wants to participate.
The GNU/Linux and other Free Software continues to be technically
cool, but my main motivation at this point for continuing to use and
advocate it is the Freedom factor. Free Software authors will not try
to stop you from copying their software, learning from its source
code, or even extending and redistributing it. It is the way that
things should have always been.
Mike
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Michael Halcrow | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Developer, IBM Linux Technology Center |
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Where did you want to go yesterday? |
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