When I was younger, I was totally enamored by the ideals of the GNU Public License. Now however, those feelings have faded, and I am here to document the conditions under which I came both to fall in and out of love with the license. I'm doing this publicly in hope that others may learn from from my experience.

Part 1: Falling In Love

My biological father had given me a Mac Classic when I was around six. It was great, but I unfortunately bricked it all-too-soon by trying to find a way to play Beyond Dark Castle without having to constantly swap between two floppy disks. Knowing no one whom I could ask for help, I ended up growing up without much exposure to computers outside of school. However, one thing was sure, I liked computers and aspired to have a working one again as soon as I could.

My step-father however was an independent house painter, and needless to say, off of his income, we weren't well off enough to budget anything that discretionary. Simply for the sake of fleshing out context, we were decently poor by American standards and lived off a combination of family and state assistance. Our house was, for a long time, nothing more than a one room shack. In the evenings, we would lay down a disarray of crammed mattresses (one shared by my parents with my two baby brothers, one for grandparents, and one for me). In the mornings, we would prop them up against the wall, so that we could have the semblance of a living room. Still, around this time, I would often peruse software catalogs marking all the programs of interest and then tallying up how much they would cost me. Way too much of course, but I liked to dream (what kid doesn't?), and dreams about using programs like Photoshop and Kai's Power Tools seemed the coolest at the time.

Eventually, my step-father found a new line of work (doing road construction) and began to make a bit more money. This happened to coincide with the summer before I was to enter high school, and so finally, two big changes were decided. One, I would get my own room (it was really just a hallway, but hey, it could fit a desk and I wasn't going to complain), and two, I could finally, for the sake of school and all those reports I would have to write, buy a computer.

And so, I bought a Packard Bell 300MHz Pentium III. It of course ran Windows, and without the Internet, I couldn't do much with it aside from play the copy of Warcraft II that the salesman had thrown in. My uncle recommended that I buy a cheap copy of Visual Studio which he knew programmers used at his work place. That's how Visual Studio became the first and only program I went out and bought for my computer. From there I started to program - nothing useful of course (it was all in VB), but it was something.

Anyway, my family's lot continued to improve, and soon we built an extension to the house. At this time, not only did I get a proper room with a door, I also somehow convinced my family that I should get Internet access. Finally, I could use the web to learn how to do things with my computer. Not so surprisingly, one of the first things I learned was that 'warez' sites allowed you to (though painfully slowly) download illegal copies of software. I didn't feel so bad about it though, because I still couldn't afford the programs, and thus they weren't really losing a customer.

But wait I thought, if software could be so easily duplicated and distributed, why did companies charge so much for it at all? Looking back at the catalogs of software with sometimes exorbitant prices, I felt deceived. Yes, they were awesome programs, but it all seemed so unfair to keep them out of my reach so artificially. Thus, I came to rationalize warez dealers as Robin Hood types.

Moving on, it was to be expected that at some point, I would have to reinstall Windows. Unfortunately, when I did, I noticed I was missing my copy of Office. It was bad timing too as I needed to write a report for school. Off to the warez sites I went to find a copy of Office. For one reason or another however, I couldn't find any real links for Office that day, and becoming frustrated. Not believing there would actually be any, I out of desperation did a search for "free office alternatives". This, of course, is how I encountered my first piece of free software, AbiWord. It downloaded fast, needed no license key, and did exactly what I needed. I could hardly believe it: who was giving this stuff away and why were they doing it? From there I found the GPL, and when I read its preamble, it resonated in me. I was hooked and in under a week became a Linux user, never turning back.

To be continued...