How I found out about FOSS

For my eleventh birthday my parents gave me a Raspberry Pi. I liked Scratch and was interested in computers previously so it was a great present. I remember it took me a few minutes to figure out what this circuit board thing really was. Sure it had lots of ports like a computer does, but in my mind a computer had a screen and a keyboard and was packaged up in a nice box. I learnt quite a bit that birthday.

I also got a NOOBS SD card and a magazine type thing with project ideas and Python tutorials in, so once I installed Raspbian I had a good bit of fun with those and learnt some programming. I thought the terminal was particularly cool and that I was very clever using cd and ls to move around the filesystem :-). I also had a go at some hardware stuff - taking photos remotely and controlling a motor - but I didn't get very far with that.

Eventually I moved on from the Pi and sitting on the floor in front of the TV with a keyboard, and I installed Ubuntu on an old laptop. Now I rarely take it out of its box. Looking back, the most important thing the Raspberry Pi did wasn't encouraging me to learn to program, but exposing me to the world of free and open-source software: using a Linux/GNU operating system, installing all these different programs people had just made and shared with everyone, being in control of the whole system and being able to poke around. Although I didn't realise it at the time it really changed the way I think about computers.

Now I can count the number of non-free programs I use (excluding firmware stuff), want to find ways to stop using those (seems unlikely), and would very much like to get in on the whole open hardware thing (but that's not going to happen any time soon). I've seen not just how much more ethical and sensible the free software approach is, but also that a lot of the time the software is technically better than the alternatives. Not being told what you can and can't do with your devices by massive corporations is a big plus too.

Collaboration and sharing just make so much sense, I'm very glad the free software community exists.

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Callum Brown, 2020-11-21

Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

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