My experiences with free software

My experience with Free Software has been very recent, infact about 8 months to be precise.

However in my IT career this has been the best learning experience and also my most productive time.

I got introduced to Free Software in a seminar in my college which was held by Krishnakant Mane, an internationally known Free software advocate and accessibility specialist.

After all those initial uncertainties and unforced grudges about migrating to GNU/Linux, a Free Software Operating System, I now feel that it was my smartest decision I ever took in my entire computing career.

The speed at which I have learned to use Free Software and the time I took to become expert in a few things is amazingly short. The credit goes partially to my personal willingness to shape my career around Free Software and use it in my daily life and mostly due to the culture which all Free Software users belong to.
WE must understand for example that there is no software without bugs, but the speed at which the hackers fix those bugs is noteworthy.

The most important aspect of Free Software is the complete involvement of the society and the community including both the software developers and the users. This is a kind of socio-technological culture where Technology is not merely a tool in the hands of a few elite people.

Every time I use Firefox to surf the net (by the way I am using it right now ) and every time i use VLC Media player to listen to music I always have it in the back of my mind that it is the community which has made the software industry so wonderful.

In this blog I am going to share my experiences including tips and tricks and would talk about softwares which I like.

I will not talk much about Firefox or VLC because we all know them as one of the best examples of Free Software success.

However I will certainly talk about softwares which concern people at large as well as the few disadvantaged people like the visually disabled who have been blessed by technologies like the Orca Screen Reader to use computers in their daily personal and professional life.

I would also like to mention here that resources like the Ubuntu Forum and IRC are some things which always make me feel safe and secured and I know one thing for sure, thanks to such community oriented resources, I have till date never got into a very serious problems with Free Software.

So watchout for my next post where I will talk about my experience with one of these softwares.