How do people find free software? My own story is convoluted, but I imagine typical. It was a combination of motivation, time, exposure, and help and necessity to overcome the commercial software propaganda machine. If any of these things had been missing, I'd have never got there. Now that I'm there, I can't go back and other people's commercial sotware problems drive me nuts.
The average person's exposure to free software has, until recently, been rare and frustrating. The commercial press is still filled with Windblows promotions and "IP" propaganda. Mindless marketed talk describing unimportant or non extant technologies, all framed in unethical and neo Darwinian terms, assault the casually interested. Most people don't have the time to filter though all of it to find useful information. Even the magic of Google, a vast improvement over previous internet search engines, fails the test. A search for "free software" returns more than seven million hits, mostly for windows based, commercial shareware. The Free Software Foundation comes up fifth on the list. The result is that the average person is brainwashed to think that commercial software, developed by "professionals" and honed by economic competition is the best kind of software and that Microsoft is some kind of great benevolent company for making all of that available at an affordable price, even "free" with the computer. Vendor lockin is likely to keep "normal" people away from free software till long after Paladium makes it next to impossible for them to try. Older office workers, frustrated by a decade of dozens of poor quality commercial software roll outs, are likely to resist free software to the death and loath it as the worst "new program" ever. It took years and help for me to discover free software. Even something as math heavy as mechanical engineering did not push me to find out about free software. I simply did not have the time to fool with my computers with assignments due. I also lacked the funds to buy more modern hardware or software. I carried through with an XT clone till 1993, for which I managed to acquire a FORTRAN compiler. Career and hobbies gave me ample interest in software but it took multiple exposures, much kind help and a task I jsut could not get done under comercial software for me to get it. My first brush with free software came from "Teach Yourself C++", a book I bought when I graduated from LSU in 1995. The book came with a GNU C++ compiler but said it lacked a C compiler. It also assumed a working knowledge of C, so I got nowhere. I would have remained clueless, had I not gone back to LSU though I had run into my first commercial software problems. As a tech for LSU's Nuclear Science Center, I encountered many Microsoft foibles and got my first misgivings. Things did not always work as advertised, though most things could be made to work. I was happily compiling homework with Watcom FORTRAN and helped wire up a new cat 5 Ethernet to replace the old cables. The misgivings with Microsoft came from interacting with the Sun workstations and other software. The more I used Sun, the more I liked how it worked, though it was very painful at first. Things that were not Microsoft did not play well with Microsoft. The common denominator took the blame. The experience culminated when a professor who was raised in communist Hungry noted, "This [Microsoft] is an evil company." He knew what evil was. At the LTRC, I was tasked with data acquisition. This provided plenty of incentive, but it was the people I met there and at the Nuclear Science Center that did it for me. By 1999 I was onto Red Hat. It took three co-workers and a fellow grad student and a tricky FORTRAN program to convince me to make the effort. LTRC mostly had Microsoft stuff, so I used that, but I was looking for an alternative. First I worked with OS/2. There were a few extra licenses available, so I was able to use it on a home system. I managed to find a C and java compiler for OS/2 in the garbage. OS/2 stuff did not get far before I ran into free software. I only worked there for a year, so neither OS/2 nor free software made it into my projects, but I did learn C/C++, Win32 API and Linux did make it into my classwork. Three co-workers at the LTRC were familiar with free software. Two of them were computer science people, practical and into flavors of BSD. One of those two introduced me to Slashdot, which I ignored for the most part. A fellow engineer and office mate told me about Tex, which he claimed was far superior to commercial word processors such as Word Perfect and Word. He installed Red Hat on his computer in my office and got the computer science guys to help it see the printer. I was impressed, but the same fellow also edited his M$ registry file by hand to try to correct a minor problem and turned his computer into a brick. More impressive still were the efforts of a fellow graduate student at the Nuclear Science Center. He had managed to get Debian on an old DEC Alpha and an old Spark. He named his DEC elvis, so the ping reply would be "elvis is alive", and used it as his primary computing platform. From him I learned that all such systems come with a compiler, even a FORTRAN compiler. I was sold and grabbed myself a Linux Unleashed book with Red Hat 5.2 in it. With a little help, I was able to master the install and get to work. I realized that it was easier to install than Windows. The real force to use the shiny new software I'd found came from an ancient FORTRAN code I got from a fluid and heat transfer course. It was ancient and it blew up my Watcom compiler. I wasted some time trying to get around the problem, but it was time I did not have. G77 ran it perfectly. G77 served me well for the rest of that course, and I started doing other things in Linux. It made me a regular user and introduced me to normal standards compliant networking software. Everything but hardware worked so much better under free software. Peer reviewed software had proved it's worth to me. >From there to my current Windws free state was a straight line. Soon I got my >hands on Debian, which was more difficult but much more informative. It also >worked on really restricted hardware. Windows installs and blow ups became >less and less tolerable and I dropped off the upgrade train with Windows 98. >A co-worker in Reactor Engineering was both knowledgeable and encouraging. As >I got into Debian and started to understand the power of available software, >Microsoft's limitations became more and more aggravating. After a year of >constant Debian use and five months without commercial software of any kind, >even Sun's community license was shocking. Were the wonders of Star Office so >great that I should read pages of EULA and press their version of the "I >submit" button? Yes, I suppose it was, but Windows will never merit that kind >of submission for me again. Their single screen, zero flexibility GUI is like >torture. Why would I submit to having my files read and my system managed by >strangers for that? How did the rest of you get it?
