Why I joined the FSFE
As this is my first post to the Free Software Foundation Europe website it seems fitting that I start my story at the beginning. Why have I decided to join the ranks of the FSFE and take up the offer of a Fellowship?
To be honest it hasn't been a hard choice. Since I've been interested in Free Software (about 7 years) the FSF has been in my mind as an example to follow. Studying how GNU/Linux worked back when I first gained interest in Free Operating Systems was quite an experience.
Starting on Caldera Linux in 1999 (which allowed me to play Tetris whilst the installer did it's job - and boy, did I have to reinstall a lot) gave the user the impression that there was a huge amount of potential available but the user had to make a lot of compromises. Compromises in the way that you had to do without a lot of the luxuries given to users of Microsoft Windows 98 or NT 4 (which was the MS flavour of that time) in terms of multimedia, mobile computing and rich client applications.
Today, as a member of a GNU/Linux User Group[0], we see users coming into the Free Software and Open Source communities excited about the rich, smooth experience of Ubuntu or SUSE. They love the usability, the multimedia experience and the ability to run a fully functional desktop without either paying a months salary (at least!) in licence fees or having to risk running unlicenced copies of proprietary office applications and so on. This new intake of users have come into the Free Software Community at a great time - they may never know the joys of running Gnome 1.x on an ancient version of Red Hat :-)
However - they are also being asked to make compromises. These compromises are related to their Freedom rather than functionality. They are asked to use proprietary graphics card drivers, proprietary applications and DRM-crippled formats and it is here where I see the FSF/FSFE playing a crucial role.
Being an advocate of Free Software and Free Standards I wish to do my small part of keeping the community going and spreading awareness of the issues that challenge the rights of developers and users. (It recently dawned on my that the "hobbyist" standard of code I can produce is unlikely to change the world, so I might as well focus on making a difference where I am more able)
I live in London (to the east of the city on the Essex/London border) with my family and I'm currently employed in a large advertising corporation.
Please feel free to contact me and say "hello". You can email me using sm@beerandspeech.org or by using my FSFE Jabber account ( sm@jabber.fsfe.org ). My personal website is http://beerandspeech.org
~sm
[0] http://gllug.org.uk
This document is in public domain
