I want to tell a story. This is the story why I started using #Linux. And why I had no Microsoft products in my house since.
That year was 1997. Computers on the manufacturing floor at work were mostly open hardware Z80 controlled GE/Fanuc PLC's... or PC's running a several kilobyte assembly language program connected to parallel port I/O boards. And that older stuff worked like a top 24/7/365 unless the power went out or someone accidentally blasted the steam seals near the desktop computer. They were controlling large production lines long as football fields.
Then some engineer who I will never forgive decided to rewrite all the production machine systems in Visual Basic for Windows 95. Windows and other proprietary systems were crashing like crazy. Remember, this is when Windows didn't use memory page protection and was filled with kernel bugs. It was unreal. If a machine had to be restarted, the production had to be restarted and that made a lot of scrap. There were about 30 active production lines running at one time, limited to the 1.6 megawatt agreement with the utilities. If all the Windows machines crashed, it took about 80,000 pounds of raw materials to restart the production lines. Forklifts would be filling up the dumpster on the back dock.
Every night at midnight, proprietary software known as BackupExec would start at midnight. After about half an hour, the load average would increase on the Oracle database and crash it. Every production machine would routinely push the production report and would crash the entire production line if it wasn't there to sync. The whole plant would shut down shortly after midnight, every night. After a week, this got old, fast.
One night, I had a life changing event with a Windows machine. An operator called on the radio that a plastic extruder was on fire. It was a 330,000 kilowatt PVC extruder and the Microsoft Visual Basic computer was showing zero degrees on every heat zone. Obviously with the fire from the barrel heaters, it was at least several hundred degrees. A few moments later was a loud explosion and the plant floor went dark with chlorine gas. I could see light to the right of me and that's where I ran. When smoke cleared, I could see the extruder barrel had shot the thousand pound head across the plant floor like a canon. Fortunately I was only several feet away from being in front of it, so I lived. Visual Basic had an interesting feature where malfunctions like that happened a lot.
That week, a copy of Redhat Linux 4.1 arrived in the mail. I installed it on my new laptop. It was crazy fast. It did everything I wanted. I compiled the kernel. I compiled everything. It could play mp3 music. And it was reliable. It was all fun and games until some years after the IPO. Google did the same thing. I would soon learn we had a term for this. #enshitification
So this is why I love free open source software and despise walled gardens of software companies. I remember #RMS on #UseNet was a bit crazy then, but he made the #GNU software license that made this possible.
That's my Linux story. And how #Microsoft almost killed me. Other people have #Microsoft horror stories, but this one was mine.
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redj 18
•Kenny Chaffin
•That could definitely change your outlook (and I'm not talking about the email client)!!
Windows should never have been relied on in a situation like that.
frater chaos likes this.
𝕕𝕚𝕒𝕟𝕖𝕒 🏳️⚧️🦋
•frater chaos likes this.
Alexandre Oliva
•wow, I think that would be an interesting story to share with the FSF. they had a call for stories like this a while ago. would you like me to dig it up and get you in touch?
interestingly, we seem to have started using GNU/Linux at about the same time, with the same distro. I used to use GNU on other flavors of Unix before that. I mostly skipped Windows, going straight from MSDOS to GNU.
but my time with nonfree software wasn't quite as painful as yours. I was not dependent on it for work, and I can't recall being life-threatened by exposure to it. I suppose I was lucky to be just a kid while I used it, and that I quickly found something that suited me so much better
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Ted
•𝕕𝕚𝕒𝕟𝕖𝕒 🏳️⚧️🦋
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eshep
•𝕕𝕚𝕒𝕟𝕖𝕒 🏳️⚧️🦋
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Digit
•Great story. Exposes the danger of proprietary software very well.
I saw GNU & FSF logos on banners in the school library around the time @𝕕𝕚𝕒𝕟𝕖𝕒 🏳️⚧️🦋 & @Alexandre Oliva started. Took around another 5-6 years of M$ abuse of users before I had enough and went looking for an alternative (at first looking for IRIX (experienced at college) on x86), and found GNU+Linux, and the free software advocacy work of the FSF, realised what those banners were in the library, and switched to suse, in late 2003. Because freedom.
& Yes please, more Gentoo (Gentoo user since 2010 (2007 if counting sabayon). 😀
Sad that Gentoo's creator, recently announced he's ending Funtoo.
& Be
... show moreGreat story. Exposes the danger of proprietary software very well.
I saw GNU & FSF logos on banners in the school library around the time @𝕕𝕚𝕒𝕟𝕖𝕒 🏳️⚧️🦋 & @Alexandre Oliva started. Took around another 5-6 years of M$ abuse of users before I had enough and went looking for an alternative (at first looking for IRIX (experienced at college) on x86), and found GNU+Linux, and the free software advocacy work of the FSF, realised what those banners were in the library, and switched to suse, in late 2003. Because freedom.
& Yes please, more Gentoo (Gentoo user since 2010 (2007 if counting sabayon). 😀
Sad that Gentoo's creator, recently announced he's ending Funtoo.
& Bedrock Linux user since 2012.
(And a thousand distros surfed around the sides.)
GNU's about freedom. Linux shares that freedom, under the GNU GPL license.
Gentoo's all about choice.
Bedrock lets you get the features of other distros interoperable as one.
Every step favouring more freedom, more choice.
Freeing from abuse, restrictions, and, as the original story highlights, dangers.
Freeing to do my computing as I prefer, especially the freedom to continue to refine towards those evolving preferences. And free to study the software, in that process of refining my use and the software and configurations, and in so doing, learning more, perchance to learn enough to be helpful in offering useful contributions back to the code, and to the community, who likewise benefit from all these opportunities availed to us by free software.
Free to mend. Free to know. Free to not be abused, neglected, nor put at risk of heavy industry machinery blowing up.
What a story, so clearly highlights why we cannot and must not put our trust in proprietary software.
Oh, and also, was going to add (like I've not waffled enough already)...
... I am among those gentoo users who have pre-emptively already added
-ai
to our global useflags. ;)I'd rather keep getting my skill up, and keep my freedom and privacy, and increase knowledge and control over my own computing.
𝕕𝕚𝕒𝕟𝕖𝕒 🏳️⚧️🦋
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