Last week, I was asked to meet with a family member for lunch. I went to venue
only to find that the family member was joined by other people. Those other
people wanted me to get involved in network marketing. People that aren't in
network marketing often refer to network marketing as a "pyramid scheme."
Yeah, one of those, you know, where you alienate your family and friends trying
to get them to not only buy a product but to have them sell the product as
well. I decided to decline the offer mostly because I'm a geek, not a
salesman. I can't schmooze people; I'm direct and to the point.
On my bike ride home from that appointment though, I realized that I am a
salesman, and I think I'm a pretty good one. The only difference is that I can
only "sell" the things I truly believe in. One of those things is Free
Software.
In 1999, I was a sophomore/junior in high school in a small podunk town. I
don't remember a lot of my life then, but I do remember the computer lab
high school. It had a T1 (lightning fast at the time) and hardly anyone at the
school knew anything about computers. I guess you could say I was the man with
one eye in the land of the blind.
With all that unused bandwidth, I had no choice but to start pirating software hand over fist.
I stumbled over a piece of software called "Red Hat Linux" which
sounded really geeky cool, and I had access to downloading all 8 cds (or
whatever it was). I was such a pirate for downloading all those cds. Man, I
was cool.
Installing it was a pain, eventually leading to me getting a book called "Linux
for Dummies" before I really knew what to do. I played around a bit, but
didn't really see the appeal of Linux over Windows. There was nothing like
Visual Basic (a habit I'm ashamed to admit I developed during high school). I
also wasn't a fan of the terminal.
2001 came and I found myself buying a copy of Mandrake 8.1 from Best Buy. It
was sexier than Red Hat, and seemed to have everything I wanted.
Unfortunately, I couldn't get my sound card to work, and every time I wanted to
install something that wasn't an rpm from the cd, I had to go build all sorts
of dependencies from source. It was hopeless, but I trudged on for the geek
cred.
That same year, I discovered Debian because someone else I knew was using it.
Debian was cool, because it had this apt-get thing that would help you install
things magically. At this point, I took off. Installing things was so easy
that I was always trying out new software. I was showing it to other people.
I'd see people using a piece of Windows software and start talking about the
Free version I got from apt, and how much better it was.
As time past, I started seeing the benefit of Free Software in everything.
I started talking to people about how they needed to embrace this idea of Free
Software. There was light in my eyes when I told people they didn't need to be
slaves to software vendors; they had choice in how their computer worked.
Over the years, I've helped many people convert their lifestyles to use more
Free Software in some capacity, whether it be through the use of OpenOffice, or
the big jump to Linux. It's been rewarding and eductional for me, and it's
even better when those that I've helped turn around to help others.
So, if I put this blog post to cheesy music on a DVD, sat you down and made you
watch it, would you join the Free Software Pyramid Scheme? What if I promised
you that if you worked as hard as I did, you would make as much money as I have
convincing people to use Free Software?