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
My roommate installed Ubuntu on my laptop when I was in college. That was the start. Now it looks like this: https://xkcd.com/456/
Like other people have said, I’ve used open-source software for decades without thinking about it, but what really made me think about it as a concept was when I got into Skyrim modding, and I saw the exorbitant subscription fees of Photoshop and then learned through that community about GIMP. Then, I started learning more about things like privacy and more tangible effects of corporate greed, and gradually switched to more alternatives.
However, I personally never tried a FOSS OS until the last couple months when someone on Lemmy talked me into trying Linux. I always thought it was only for people with high levels of technical skills, but it turns out there are distros that are extremely accessible to users like myself.
Linux. I think I started playing with it around 2001. I was a computer nerd on high school and I wanted to be a hacker. I would be lying if I said that The Matrix wasn’t a big factor. To this day I use black console with green text.
Classy!
Linux for me as well. It was endless customization that hooked me
For me it was first VLC without really knowing what FOSS was, then KeePass while getting to know a bit about it, and finally Thunderbird. What did it for me was just how good and bullshit-free they were, especially in comparison to paid competitors. They really are the best products in their field, proving the quality often behind FOSS software.
I like to think of FOSS as enshitification-proof
FOSS is enshitification-hardened, not proof.
VLC remains awesome because the guy (maybe Jean-Baptiste Kempf?) that controls the project has refused to be bought, has in fact refused HUGE sums of money.
The original author of any project has to right to sell it with the corresponding licence changes at any time.
There’s some legal grey area on something like Linux or VLC which have MANY MANY developer hands in the pie, and existing users could certainly fork off the existing releases, but VLC could pivot tomorrow to a for profit company and make future releases of the official VLC a paid product, if they choose too.True, and so all honour to the creators for remaining FOSS, especially smaller projects spearheaded by a single dev
Altough usually when a shift like that happens in bigger projects there’s a community fork, and the original project withers. Like Owncloud -> Nextcloud , OpenOffice -> LibreOffice, MySQL -> MariaDB
You could argue there’s some degree enshitification through the Ubuntu snapification driven by Canonical. Although that’s not so much about making Ubuntu deliberately worse, it’s more moving Ubuntu forward in a way that aligns with Canonical’s strategic goals. So its “paying the strategy tax” rather than direct enshitification.
For collaborative projects like Linux I believe every contributor would need to agree to any license change, which is practically impossible
Using linux as an alternative to windows and really enjoying it.
Firefox and VLC on Windows for years, which just worked. Later XBMC/Kodi and fileserver which where s… on windows but, again, just worked on Linux. When Windows later on kept nagging for something I migrated to 100% Open Source and have been a happy camper ever since!
Ubuntu Gnome GIMP
Getting a free Ubuntu live CD back in 2007 when I was a teenager. We had the shittiest internet, I think it was like 512kbps ADSL, so it was really hard to download software. No one I knew at the time was into linux or open source, so I learnt about it all from that Ubuntu CD and the smaller programs I downloaded with it once setting it up. I learnt GRUB and dual-booted it on the laptop I had for school.
There really wasn’t a specific gateway product, and I’m still using closed and open source solutions back to back.
User experience and user interface are more important to me than open source. The only consideration I have beyond that would be privacy & security.
For instance I’ve always used Firefox and rejected Chrome due to data privacy concerns, and would use a portable chromium installation if a website was inaccessible with FF. On the other hand side MS Office and Photoshop are vastly superior to libre office and gimp.
When it comes to applications I use once in a blue moon for a few minutes at a time, I’ll usually go for FOSS, but moreso because it’s free and the UI can be as ugly as it wants if I don’t have to stare at it for hours on end.
And well, I absolutely despise Apple as a company, so using Android was pretty much without alternatives, after BlackBerry discontinued their OS.
I’m very much the same. It mostly depends on “does the open source program do what I need/want?” If not, I’m okay with using a closed source version of it.
My current number one example here would be spreadsheet calculators. Years ago (and for my personal use) I only used LibreOffice/OpenOffice because it did/does all I need. But at work I need to use MS Excel not only because it’s what the company has but also because the tables function and everything that relates to it (like data slicers, automatic expansion of formulas and formats, etc.) is really awesome and either super complex to replicate or straight up impossible in LibreOffice. And a couple months ago I decided to optimize the Excel sheets at work by incorporating some VBA macros. It’s super useful and I couldn’t find an open source alternative to it that would not run into problems on existing VBA-Excel sheets very, very quickly.
On the other hand I have photo editing / art programs. For those, I happily hopped from one FOSS to another (GIMP to Krita and I think I had a third one at some point as well) because I actually only need the “basic” and “on the surface” tools of such programs. And so I never even began feeling a pressure to use a closed source program.
For me it was a combination of factors: Windows has been going down the shitter for at least 10 years now, FOSS software has been getting better and better, and I’ve learned to use more FOSS tools as I grew tired of dealing with Windows.
If I had to point at one project that made me go “Wow, this is amazing”, I’d say ffmpeg. Even in my Windows days, I’ve always enjoyed digital preservation, when I discovered ffmpeg around 2015 it was an eye opener, so many features, so many options, I’ve been using it on a daily basis ever since.
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Gimp, OpenOffice.org, VLC, Slackware, and on and on after that. Every flavor of Linux: RedHat, SuSe, Ubuntu, now on Manjaro and Endeavour.
Apache. This was over 20 years ago. The web server that everyone seemed to be using was free to download and open source. That made a big impact on how I viewed free software, and encouraged me to use more of it.
I can’t even remember… It was probably when I first heard about Linux in the early/mid 90’s. I got Slackware in 93 or 94 and fascinated by the idea in general.
Hell, if might even have started before that when I was first learning to read and read through our encyclopedia collection like bedtime stories (I was obsessed with reading anything in print once I learned how). I know that’s how I learned about the internet.
I got Slackware in 93 or 94 and fascinated by the idea in general.
Slackers Unite! I started with Slack 3.1 in '96.
Although I technically used OSS before (ie Firefox), Linux (Ubuntu) is what made me actually start caring about it.
My first contact to FOSS were probably Firefox, Open Office (before libre office existed) and Gimp.
