First contact
Off the Beat: Bruce Byfield's Blog
Fourteen years ago to the day, free software became part of my life. Ever since, nothing in my life has been the same.
It wasn't my first encounter. I had spent six months documenting applications that ran on Slackware, including generating my own description of the file-hierarchy. But I knew nothing of the community that was building Slackware, much less any other project, and my own efforts to set it up unassisted had been spectacularly unsuccessful.
However, I did have a distaste for Windows, and had used alternate versions of DOS and OS/2. It would be a couple of years before how IBM had betrayed OS/2 would become common knowledge, but what happened was already obvious in general outline, and I was in no mood to trust large corporations. It was the dot-com boom, and, while I was proud of how quickly I'd transitioned from university instructor to freelance technical writer, I wanted to be part of the excitement that was supposed to be happening.
I was just wondering if I should consider moving to The Bay area when I saw an ad in the newspaper (back then, reading classified ads was still an important part of job-hunting). A new company wanted a writer with experience of other operating systems to do something "revolutionary" (that was how people talked back then, and somehow we managed to use such words without giggling).
I applied within the hour.
In due course, I received a phone call and suited up for an interview.
For the first twenty minutes, I was wondering if I had made a mistake. I was being interviewed by NetNation, a web-hosting company to which I didn't remember applying. My confusion wasn't helped by the fact that the interviewer was long on generalities and short on specifics. But I did my best to impress. Probably, I kept telling myself, I was as well-qualified as anyone, if I could just learn what company I was interviewing for.
My answers must have satisfied, because eventually the interviewer invited me to walk with him. We took the elevator to an office on the twentieth that overlooked the harbour and was flooded with sunlight on three sides. There was little furniture, and only three young men, with workstations so sparse that they might have been squatting.
They weren't, of course. They were the first employees of a NetNation subsidiary called Stormix Technologies that was planning a commercial version of Debian. The three quizzed me about my experience with alternate operating systems.
I had to admit that I had never heard of Debian, but I wasn't too concerned about my honesty. To the local members of the Society for Technical Communication, an alternate operating system would be 4DOS. As incomplete as my experience was, it was still more than any other applicant was likely to have.
By the time I returned home, I decided that I wanted to be part of a startup and of such grand ambitions. I found my way to the Debian site, and, ignoring the amateur-looking pages, read every page as carefully as I could, taking notes and growing increasingly excited.
"Kid," I kept saying, quoting Harlan Ellison until my partner threatened bodily assault, "I have fallen down the rabbit hole!"
Free software, I decided, was the sort of idealism I wanted in my daily life. After having been an instructor, just collecting a pay cheque wasn't enough for me. I went to bed that night, half-drunk on the possibilities -- and I'm not sure that I have been sober since.
I was so excited that learning I had the job was an anti-climax. Free software was exactly what I had been waiting for. It was fate, it was karma and destiny, and getting the job was so obviously the next part of the story that I never really doubted that I would.
Needless to say, I was as green as a hardcore environmentalist. My first task at Stormix -- to install my own workstation -- went easily enough, but there was a whole community and a growing number of companies that I needed to learn about if I wanted any hope of fitting in. I started spending the first hour of every day reading sites like Slashdot, Newsforge, and Linux Today (a habit I have retained ever since). I learned to have an opinion on burning issues like GNOME vs KDE or Vim vs Emacs. I read licenses to understand how the idealism was put into practice, and began to have opinions about how a company could best fit into the existing community Gradually, the do-it-yourself atmosphere of free software became my own.
Stormix proved to be more of a sustained fantasy than a serious company, like many companies at the time. But after I moved on, proprietary software seemed to me both faintly evil and unbearably dull. Whenever I could, I took work that involved free software.
Eventually, in the middle of a consulting gig on a proprietary online photo processing system that was keeping me far too often indoors in the hot final days of summer, I took a long walk at lunch along the Coal Harbour seawall and admitted I could no longer sustain even a professional pretense of caring about what I had been hired to do.
Three weeks later, I finished the gig and started writing articles about free software full-time rather than on the side. Nine years later, I regret absolutely nothing, and hope to continue on the free software beat until advanced senility leaves me unable to type.
comments powered by DisqusSubscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Gnome Fans Everywhere Rejoice for the Latest Release
Gnome 47.2 is now available for general use but don't expect much in the way of newness, as this is all about improvements and bug fixes.
-
Latest Cinnamon Desktop Releases with a Bold New Look
Just in time for the holidays, the developer of the Cinnamon desktop has shipped a new release to help spice up your eggnog with new features and a new look.
-
Armbian 24.11 Released with Expanded Hardware Support
If you've been waiting for Armbian to support OrangePi 5 Max and Radxa ROCK 5B+, the wait is over.
-
SUSE Renames Several Products for Better Name Recognition
SUSE has been a very powerful player in the European market, but it knows it must branch out to gain serious traction. Will a name change do the trick?
-
ESET Discovers New Linux Malware
WolfsBane is an all-in-one malware that has hit the Linux operating system and includes a dropper, a launcher, and a backdoor.
-
New Linux Kernel Patch Allows Forcing a CPU Mitigation
Even when CPU mitigations can consume precious CPU cycles, it might not be a bad idea to allow users to enable them, even if your machine isn't vulnerable.
-
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.5 Released
Notify your friends, loved ones, and colleagues that the latest version of RHEL is available with plenty of enhancements.
-
Linux Sees Massive Performance Increase from a Single Line of Code
With one line of code, Intel was able to increase the performance of the Linux kernel by 4,000 percent.
-
Fedora KDE Approved as an Official Spin
If you prefer the Plasma desktop environment and the Fedora distribution, you're in luck because there's now an official spin that is listed on the same level as the Fedora Workstation edition.
-
New Steam Client Ups the Ante for Linux
The latest release from Steam has some pretty cool tricks up its sleeve.