Hm...
I was reading about free software for a very long time before I started
advocating it. I read a lot of Richard Stallman's essays in particular. At
some point while I had the OpenPandora, I had a good understanding of what
free software, copyleft, etc is. I remember at one point considering whether
I should use the term "free software" or "open source" to describe my free
programs, because one side of me wanted to say "free software" because "open
source" is a weak term, while another side of me wanted to say "open source"
because it is more commonly understood. You can tell by that way of thinking
about the dilemma that I wasn't a free software advocate yet, but I did know
what they are.
Now, oddly enough, what made me a free software advocate was... the
OpenPandora, a device which is not even a free system and has a community
that just doesn't care about whether or not they're using free software. See,
ARM GNU/Linux devices are not exactly common; most GNU/Linux users use x86
processors, and this was before Android was working on the device, so every
proprietary program which was popular was a nuisance for Pandora users. In
particular, I recall that I was annoyed that Skype and Dropbox, being nonfree
programs, couldn't be ported to the Pandora. The one that personally annoyed
me the most, though, was Game Maker, because I had developed a fairly large
game in Game Maker that I was proud of, and because Game Maker was
proprietary and therefore could not be ported to the Pandora, which was my
favorite device at the time, I was upset. At this time, I was also getting
sick of Windows, which was (and I think still is) the only OS that the Game
Maker IDE would work on.
Also worth mentioning, though I don't think it particularly swayed me, is
Android, which eventually was released on the OpenPandora. I can say that I
was shocked: programs were routinely asking, on installation, to be
permanently granted permissions to do things they clearly didn't need to do
to my system. GPS, call records, and other things that games have no business
accessing. This was a huge shock to me for two reasons: one, this was a
requirement, and a routine one, so it mean that Android was the most
vulnerable OS I had ever seen; and two, nobody in the "open source" community
apparently cared. I don't know if I had learned from the FSF or RMS at this
point about the prevalence of malicious features in nonfree software, but I
didn't need to be told this: if a program is requiring access to a part of
your phone that can only be used to spy on you, the program is spying on you.
And despite both this and the extreme vulnerability of the system, it was
being held up as an example of "open source", presumably just because it uses
Linux.
So eventually, I started agreeing with the free software movement (I'm not
sure if this was before or after Android came out on the Pandora). I looked
at the FSF's list of endorsed distros, chose Trisquel because it seemed nice
from the description, and installed it. At this point, though, I was not a
strong advocate: I gave an exception to nonfree games, in particular, and I
still commonly booted into Windows and Linux Mint, but I supported the
overall philosophy behind free software rather than the open source
philosophy, i.e. that nonfree software is bad because it's unethical rather
than free software being good because it's practically better. Still, I
continued to play nonfree games and accept occasional usage of nonfree
software outside of Trisquel until some time when I was in college last
calendar year, when I interacted significantly with this very community for
the first time. The reason was simple: I just loved this community, the
dedication especially, and I simply couldn't resist joining in; saying "no"
to all nonfree software, not giving an exception to nonfree games and not
giving occasional exceptions to Flash. It took a while for me to abandon the
Pandora (I recently picked it back up, but with no nonfree software,
rendering it useful for little other than text editing unfortunately), but I
haven't gone back to nonfree software since, and I'm glad I haven't.
