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 loveI 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!)