When I hear the term open source, I imagine Richard Stallman yelling at me. I also think of the many arguments I’ve had with my friends over which open-source license is best, of flipping through the long list of “credits” at the bottom of some big-studio game with a whole section dedicated to open-source software, Discord disputes over which Firefox fork is truly the most “free,” devastation at Mozilla’s recent moves to becoming more and more corporate.

My history with free software (you’re welcome, rms) goes back to elementary school when I first installed Linux Mint on my old Thinkpad. It was a desperate attempt to keep an aging computer alive. Mint survived all of two weeks before I was onto Ubuntu, then Kali (as all tech-obsessed 11-year-olds do), then ElementaryOS, then Manjaro. By tenth grade, I was hopping between Discord servers, arguing over init system elitism and building custom desktop environments with unholy mixes of compositors and window managers held together with duck tape, staples, and a ton of scripts. I was living, and loving, the free software community.

I slowly became disillusioned with much of the space when I realised one huge issue - free software developers kept getting screwed. It was not at all unusual to hear about someone I knew contributing to some huge project, only for that project to be used by Amazon in their latest surveillance tool. It was disheartening, and depressing. When I realised I was doing Google’s job for them, building out Flutter tools, I started switching my code over from MIT to AGPL, prompting arguments with my friends.

To me, open source reminds me of the unsung heroes keeping our engineering world alive. It’s the guy who wrote left-pad, keeping the entire rest of npm alive. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realised just how much more symbiotic that relationship really is. After all, Google, Apple, Microsoft - these are all some of the most important contributors to the open source world.

Projects

I use open source projects every single day, and not in some abstract, indirect way. My daily browser is Librewolf - a free software fork of Firefox with an extreme emphasis on privacy. I might be a macOS user now, but my window manager is Amethyst, an open source gem for people trying to replicate their Linux glory days on a far more restricted OS. I’m running open source streaming servers, writing code with open source languages (special thanks to the Python, Rust, and Julia development teams for keeping my entire engineering career afloat), and watching videos with VLC, which, thanks to the VideoLAN team, is still free and open source despite the millions of dollars they’ve been offered.

I wouldn’t be here as an engineer without the world of open-source development. And neither would any other engineer.