…and why do I have such a cliché title?

Today was one of those weird days when I suddenly had a stupid amount of articles in my RSS reader to trawl through. Sometimes it happens and when it does it is time to crack open my speed reading eyes and mentally bin all uninteresting finds as they race across the centre point of my vision. The articles that make the brake are very quickly opened in new tabs and hence a reading list is formed. One of the articles that made it into tab-land was a very interesting article by Ubuntu’s Jono Bacon (http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/08/24/revisiting-ethos/) in which he talked about how he got involved in free software and asking how his readership first got interested in projects that carried the free and open-source mark.

Well, I sat back in my chair and wondered how to phrase it. Each time I thought of something different I liked about free software and then the thing I liked got overshadowed by something else I liked. This went on for at least a good five minutes in my head and I’m sure if somebody could see into my mind the music video for, ‘The Ultimate Showdown’, would be practically producing itself. So after much deliberation I thought, considering I’m supposed to do this for a semi-informal job, I should write a blog post on why I am such a fanatic for free software. Like many passionate people in the computing world, learning about and using free software was somewhat of a rite of passage for me at quite an early age so I guess before I can give my opinions, a little back-story into me is needed to make a lot of things make sense. Read more »