Today’s xkcd is so val­id­at­ing. I first stumbled across the GNU mani­festo prob­ably in 1996, when I was in high school. I wanted to teach myself C and a good way to do that was to use the DJGPP com­piler, which led me to GNU. I didn’t really think much of it at the time except that these “Free Soft­ware Found­a­tion” people took soft­ware way too ser­i­ously, but I was happy to have a free com­piler to play with.

About two years after that, I installed Slack­ware Linux. It was the first Unix I’d ever used and, con­sequently, the only logical oper­at­ing sys­tem I’d used up to that point. I fell in love with it imme­di­ately. Unix itself was fun, but the fact that the source code was avail­able for everything and I could tinker with everything was a big draw. I fell in love with free soft­ware almost as quickly as I fell in love with Unix.

I spent the end of my high school days and all of my under­gradu­ate days with Slack­ware, mak­ing little con­tri­bu­tions to free soft­ware pro­jects here and there where I found the time. I also read Slash­dot reg­u­larly, the home­land for self-​​loathing insec­ure nerds. The Slash­dot­ters loved Linux and free soft­ware as much as I did and thus, because they were so self-​​loathing, they spent most of their time talk­ing about how ter­rible Linux and free soft­ware were. Free soft­ware was unreal­ist­ic­ally uto­pian, was never going to suc­ceed, no real people would ever care about it, it was only for nerdy base­ment dwell­ers who had no concept of the real world, and so on.

I actu­ally believed a lot of it, but I didn’t really care. I never thought free soft­ware would ever catch on in a ser­i­ous way and thought Linux would never be more than a hobby OS, but I kept with it fore­most because I per­son­ally enjoyed it and also because con­trib­ut­ing to a com­munal effort just felt like the Right thing to do. It’s prob­ably espe­cially good to do the Right thing when you’re that age because it’s the easi­est time to do it.

Ima­gine my sur­prise 10+ years later find­ing that non-​​nerdy people, people who have no attach­ment or fond­ness for soft­ware or com­puters, can name Tux as the Linux mas­cot. Win­dows is still dom­in­ant, of course, but Linux is part of the main­stream world, and free soft­ware runs the world, par­tic­u­larly through web ser­vices. The xkcd comic is a nice reminder that the world still bene­fits from doing the Right thing, maybe not right away or even in the fore­see­able future, but even­tu­ally. Kids are much bet­ter than adults at pick­ing up new things, pick­ing up what’s right, what makes sense and what’s garbage. I think a big part of where we are now is due to the fact that so many kids were exposed to Linux (even if just in name) when they were young and, as they grew up and entered the work­ing world, they decided to make Linux and its val­ues part of our world.

Today's xkcd is so validating. I first stumbled across the GNU manifesto probably in 1996, when I was in high school. I wanted to teach myself C and a good way to do that was to use the DJGPP compiler, which led me to GNU. I didn't really think much of it at the ...