I program for the joy of it. My dad got me a Commodore 64 when I was little. Later I had an IBM XT PCjr. I read Abrash's black book and wrote Wu anti-alias line drawing routines in assembly using DOS debug. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debug_(command) ) It was brutal and I loved it.
I encountered "The Next Whole Earth Catalog" and learned about Christopher Alexander (Pattern Language), Bill Mollison (Permaculture), and Bucky Fuller (Design Science Revolution), among others, and I developed a vision of a different, better world, where drudgery was eliminated by science and technology.
To me software is really only important as a means to this end, and charging for copies of it adds unnecessary and even regressive friction.
coding without pay is so foreign to me
Ha! I wrote software for about a decade before getting a job doing it. I had been homeless for several years and got tired of e.g. not having a refrigerator or indoor plumbing, so I whumped up a project, presented it at CodeCon 2004, and was hired for my first real computer job later that day. (I'm still messing around with that project BTW: https://xerblin.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html )
I should mention that computers can also serve as a kind of spiritual investigation tool, but that's really only for folks on what is called the "mind-only" path.
Anyway, to sum up: to me FOSS is only important as a way to transform economic paradigm to a better. more humane world. Otherwise you're just automating this current shitty system, and "Where's the fun in that?"
Comments
I program for the joy of it. My dad got me a Commodore 64 when I was little. Later I had an IBM XT PCjr. I read Abrash's black book and wrote Wu anti-alias line drawing routines in assembly using DOS debug. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debug_(command) ) It was brutal and I loved it.
I encountered "The Next Whole Earth Catalog" and learned about Christopher Alexander (Pattern Language), Bill Mollison (Permaculture), and Bucky Fuller (Design Science Revolution), among others, and I developed a vision of a different, better world, where drudgery was eliminated by science and technology.
To me software is really only important as a means to this end, and charging for copies of it adds unnecessary and even regressive friction.
Ha! I wrote software for about a decade before getting a job doing it. I had been homeless for several years and got tired of e.g. not having a refrigerator or indoor plumbing, so I whumped up a project, presented it at CodeCon 2004, and was hired for my first real computer job later that day. (I'm still messing around with that project BTW: https://xerblin.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html )
I should mention that computers can also serve as a kind of spiritual investigation tool, but that's really only for folks on what is called the "mind-only" path.
Anyway, to sum up: to me FOSS is only important as a way to transform economic paradigm to a better. more humane world. Otherwise you're just automating this current shitty system, and "Where's the fun in that?"