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How I Learned to Insist on Free Software

I saw a post on r/freesoftware yesterday and thought I'd write my response here.

I was only 11 years old

I loved Apple so much, I had all the apps and WWDC videos

I read Apple's website every night before bed, longing for the life I’d be given

Apple is love I say; Apple is life

When I was about eleven years old, I was obsessed with Macs. I would read Apple's website every day, and I scoured the Web for ways to make my computer act more like a Mac. It mostly involved installing junky themes on top of Windows XP. But, one day, I stumbled upon a Darwin project on SourceForge, and I learned about the Unix core of Mac OS X and how it was very similar to GNU+Linux.

Eventually, I landed on Ubuntu's website. I noticed they would mail me a CD of Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn in th mail at no cost. I couldn't believe that they would do it, so I asked for a CD, and they actually sent it! When it arrived in the mail, I was shocked. I opened the CD cover and read it all immediately.

The CD cover talked about something odd. It said Ubuntu was free software, but that it didn't mean that Ubuntu was necessarily at zero cost. It said it was free because of freedom, it gave me a bulleted list of each of the Four Freedoms. It said Ubuntu would always guarantee these to its users.

The idea of free software and the spirit of ubuntu intrigued me. When I booted Ubuntu on my computer for the first time, all I could think was Wow! I have the source code to all of this? I can learn how my whole computer works, if I learn how to program? This is amazing!

I bragged about this, and how it had the same core as the operating system on Macs. I made it look like a Mac desktop, and I used Ubuntu for a year while saving up to buy a MacBook. I used my MacBook for a year, until I realized that I kept trying to do things the Ubuntu way, because I started to actually appreciate free software.

So, I switched back to Ubuntu. I sold my MacBook and got a Meerkat from System 76 with Ubuntu pre-installed. I used for a long time.

At one point in my life, I was moving a between locations a lot, and I had nowhere to power on my Meerkat. I ended up using my Galaxy Nexus and Google services for everything. I really bought into the ChromeOS idea being pushed by Google at the time, and all my data was solely stored on Google services.

That didn't last long. I got into trouble fast. Apparently, I did something on just one of Google's services that Google did not like, and so they decided to shut down my account and lock me out forever. I lost all my data, including precious childhood photos and school projects that I liked to look back on. All of it, just gone.

At that time, I still valued free software, even though I didn't think about the perils of SaaSS. It was why I made sure to get my mobile rooted and flashed with a custom operating system. And after my experience of losing lots of childhood memories, I said this is the last straw!. I left Chrome and went back to using my own computer to do my activities. I installed Mint GNU+Linux on my laptop and FreeBSD on my Meerkat.

I used FreeBSD for a while. I thought Wow! It's so free that you can destroy freedom! I used it for about a year in 2013, thinking that all the source code on it was free software by default. I took special care not to install proprietary programs like Adobe Flash. My FreeBSD buddies at the time heckled me for this, calling me names like freetard. Eventually, they got annoyed by my refusal to install proprietary programs on my FreeBSD system, so I thought You know, maybe these mean people are wrong about the extremism of GNU. Maybe GNU is not so bad.

So, I went to GNU's website. I read about FreeBSD. What I read astounded me: No BSD distribution has policies against proprietary binary-only firmware, they said.

I felt betrayed. Liars! I thought. But, maybe GNU was lying to stick it to the BSD people. Maybe it wasn't that big a deal. So, I went back to the FreeBSD user group. I asked them about it. Where are the blobs in FreeBSD's source code?

They answered me. Lo and behold, there was indeed a blob on my system, buried in the same directory as all the rest of my system's source code. And in it, I read a message that was a slap in the face to my dignity as a user.

* No reverse engineering, decompilation, or disassembly of this software
is permitted.
  

To top it off, there was no source code. To modify this software, you'd have to do what was forbidden above. It's completely illegible!

begin-base64 644 iwlwifi-1000-39.31.5.1.fw.uu
AAAAAElXTAoxMDAwIGZ3IHYzOS4zMS41LjEgYnVpbGQgMzUxMzgKAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAQUfJ0KJAAABAAAAAAAAAAEAAAAY7AEAICCADwAAQABpIAAAaSBAAGkg
AABpIEAAICCADwAA6ABpIAAAaSBAAGkgAABpIEAAICCADwAAMAVpIAAAaSBAAGkgAABKIAAASiEA

This is what the whole remainder of the so-called source code looked like. It was nothing but a bunch of binary junk encoded in base64. I felt cheated. This is not source! I thought.

Angry, I went back to GNU's website. I asked myself, Where is a system that will respect my ownership of it? I searched their website and read all their philosophy. And, eventually, I found a list of distributions that were guaranteed to respect me as their master. My eyes lit up.

I installed Trisquel. I never looked back.

(Well, I still distro-hop between free distros. I kinda need to stop that!)