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What was your gateway product to open source? (www.cnet.com)

submitted 1 year ago by graphito@beehaw.org to c/foss@beehaw.org

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I want to talk about our gateway products to open source. You know, that one product or software that made us go, "Whoa, this is amazing!" and got us hooked on the world of open source.

What made you to jump ships? Was it the "free" side of things like qBittorrent? Did you even know that some of your programs are open source before you got into the topic?

For me those products were:

Android
Firefox
VLC
Calibre

Am thinking to order some merch and I wanna make it more accessible to people unfamilliar with open source culture. Now, am looking for fairly normalized but still underrepresented product -- maybe it could serve as a conversation starter and push some people to open source

(page 4) 23 comments

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[-] liss_up@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

For me, the gateway was via palm pilot careware. My dad had a PDA when I was a kid, and he let me learn how to program it. Then I learned that there were websites to download software for it, and some of that software was "careware", ie pay only if you're able. Something clicked in my head that I could both write and access software without cost being a barrier, and that got me reading about FLOSS philosophy as I entered high school and suddenly I was dual booting ubuntu on the intel iBook I had saved up for and then it was too late for me: FLOSS had me.

[-] GenBlob@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

Teeworlds. When I was a kid I searched up "free online multiplayer games on pc" and it actually led me to this Wikipedia article full of open source games. I tried out teeworlds and I was hooked on it and it led me to playing other open source games like cube 2 and open arena. In my head, the term open source meant "free stuff". Searching for open source stuff led me to discovering Linux and trying it though the Wubi installer and eventually moving to it a few years later.

[-] iByteABit@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

I've used a few open source programs before studying CS without knowing what FOSS was, but the time when I really got into it and started diving deeper is probably after installing Arch Linux

[-] DeadlineX@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

My buddy’s mom took his pc as punishment for some nonsense. We cobbled together some parts so he could secretly play an online flash game with me. His frames were seconds behind mine. But we installed Ubuntu on it since we couldn’t afford windows in high school. So I learned about Linux.

[-] HumbleFlamingo@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

DDWRT technically came first for me, and m0n0wall, but OpenSolaris is where I really started to use it.

[-] jet@hackertalks.com 2 points 1 year ago

WWIV

[-] Sina@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

Suse in 1999.

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this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023

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