My relation with free software
Past month I’ve started the Free Software Master arranged by Caixanova, Igalia and URJC in Vigo, this’s the second edition of that master (previous was hosted at A Coruña) and this year I’m a student. I’m sure that I’m going to learn a lot of interested things about free software: philosophy, license, development, communities, … As you can guess I’m going to use this blog to post some comments about exercises, practices, examples or whatever interesting thing related with this master (you can take this post as the first example).
In the next paragraphs I’ll try to sum up my relation with free software from my first contact to nowadays trying to answer some question of the subject Introduction to Libre Software.
My first use of free software could be the use of Netscape as web browser before enter University (more or less between 1999 and 2001), however at that moment I only know that I didn’t have to pay and it worked better than Internet Explorer nothing related with free software.
When I started my degree on Computer Science at University (2001) I had my first contact with free software because there was Linux installed on University computers (it wasn’t the default OS but it was installed), the distribution was a Red Hat 6 and I installed it in my home with some problems: printer and modem internet connection didn’t work. This year I’ve also my first contact with Emacs without success.
During the years at University and after that I tested a few distributions:
- Red Hat: The first contact and a good first step.
- Fedora: The evolution of Red Hat and my distribution for some years.
- Ubuntu: My default distribution since 2005.
- Open Suse: Nothing special to highlight only a test.
From last years at University I’ve been a free software user but only as end user moreover I’ve tried to spread the use of free software applications, among other: Firefox, OpenOffice.org, Eclipse, …
After join Igalia I’ve started to collaborate in some free software projects mainly related with TYPO3 a content management system written in PHP.
Finally I can say that free software has evolved since my first contacts and today it’s more than ready to be used by anyone. Maybe in a few years the main applications in any field would be free software, we should push for it.
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