Re: How do women become involved in free / open source projects?
On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 10:51:16 -0800, Bruce Byfield wrote:
> Would anyone be willing to comment or share their experience?
Ok, here's mine too. First of all, I think I don't fit into Helen's
description of women paths, but I think that other women might.
I'm the youngest child of 4 siblings, when I was 8 (1988) we had a
commodore 128 for all the family and we shared it. Around 1992, my
parents had bought a PC and one of my brothers decided to join
Fidonet, and since we had this "sharing" policy, he created accounts
for all of us, including me (I was 12).
Thanks to that, I became very involved in the Fidonet community that
was quite thriving at the time, I spent a big amount of time writing
on the lists, and working on hosting our BBS. I spent most of my
hours out of school in front of the computer.
At the age of 15, I started going out with a guy from Fidonet who
taught me a bit about programming. I started with Pascal, which is a
language that I know despise, but I didn't know better at the time. I
spent a lot of time learning how to program, and experimenting the
things I was able to do.
When I finished high school (at 18) I started learning some other
languages (Java and -may God forgive me- Visual Basic, mainly), and
after a short while, started to make a living out of it.
So, while I was working as a programmer of propietary software, around
2000, I came into contact with the Free Software philosophy, and after
the initial shock, I became a big fan of it. I realized how much time
I had been wasting on the things I'd been programming in the past, how
many more things could be achieved when working together, and all
that. In practically no-time I became a Free Software "taliban".
After that, I decided that if I wanted to help the Free Software
community, I had to learn some "real man's languages" and learned C
and C++, Perl and Bash.
So, I became involved in open source through the philosophy, but
mainly because I felt really frustrated as a propietary software
developer. Making closed software is frustrating. Making free
software can become an awesome experience.
I didn't came into the Free Software community because "Windows
crashed on me a lot", it didn't (I don't know why, I guess I'm just
lucky), I didn't came into the Free Software community because I
preferred the console to the graphic environment or GNOME's interface
to Windows' one. I came into the Free Software community because I
feel that once you've understood the free software philosophy, you
realize how much more satisfying it is to use and write free software
than use and write closed software.
--
Besos,
Marga
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