By which I mean free as in freedom software, not so much free-as-in-beer.
The free software movement resonates with me like a tuning fork resonates with being hit on something hard. Free software is rad, because it aligns itself nicely with my own beliefs:
At that young age, I understood that all software was free-as-in-beer. I was raised thinking software, mostly games, are to be copied at parties with friends. Software cost as much as the blank media you had to buy to put it on, plus the cost of the disk puncher so you could use both sides of the 5-1/4" floppy. All the way through my post-college years, software was considered free-as-in-beer. Tons of CDROM and ZIP disks full of self-mounting disk images with serial numbers, installers, cracks, no-cds, and serial databases. A currency for swapping for new files and programs. A resource for re-installing (again). A resource for fixing relative's computers. A resting-home for games that were too large to co-exist on the hardware simultaneously. I probably never had the right to do this either, but I never checked.
Must-have game titles were bought as I became a wage- and then salary-earning member of society. Game developers garnered respect, while publishers were despised for slowing down or crashing already-ancient hardware with copy protection. As I became a true dork, I learned to hate my Macintosh and my hand-me-down PC. My rage was chiefly directed against the operating systems; Windows for its stupidity and complexity, MacOS for its lack of transparency, FreeBSD and Debian Gnu/Linux for that very Do It Yourself-ness that brought them to my desktop. They all ate my time out of curiousity and maintenance. But thank god for Debian.
These days, I chiefly love the right to modify broken software. I log bugs with free software, I fix my own copy of broken software. And I rest pretty easy. With the unfortunate exception of win32 (which I buy and use for its percieved simplicity of use, and to play games on), I'm done with non-free software.
Um, where is this going again? Ah, the First Dork Manifesto. Right.
The free software movement resonates with me like a tuning fork resonates with being hit on something hard. Free software is rad, because it aligns itself nicely with my own beliefs:
- I can copy it and distribute it freely
- I can edit and hack on it freely
At that young age, I understood that all software was free-as-in-beer. I was raised thinking software, mostly games, are to be copied at parties with friends. Software cost as much as the blank media you had to buy to put it on, plus the cost of the disk puncher so you could use both sides of the 5-1/4" floppy. All the way through my post-college years, software was considered free-as-in-beer. Tons of CDROM and ZIP disks full of self-mounting disk images with serial numbers, installers, cracks, no-cds, and serial databases. A currency for swapping for new files and programs. A resource for re-installing (again). A resource for fixing relative's computers. A resting-home for games that were too large to co-exist on the hardware simultaneously. I probably never had the right to do this either, but I never checked.
Must-have game titles were bought as I became a wage- and then salary-earning member of society. Game developers garnered respect, while publishers were despised for slowing down or crashing already-ancient hardware with copy protection. As I became a true dork, I learned to hate my Macintosh and my hand-me-down PC. My rage was chiefly directed against the operating systems; Windows for its stupidity and complexity, MacOS for its lack of transparency, FreeBSD and Debian Gnu/Linux for that very Do It Yourself-ness that brought them to my desktop. They all ate my time out of curiousity and maintenance. But thank god for Debian.
These days, I chiefly love the right to modify broken software. I log bugs with free software, I fix my own copy of broken software. And I rest pretty easy. With the unfortunate exception of win32 (which I buy and use for its percieved simplicity of use, and to play games on), I'm done with non-free software.
Um, where is this going again? Ah, the First Dork Manifesto. Right.
Leave a comment