Starting at the age of 12, I was given $20 a week for my food. (If it was a good week. Otherwise it might $10 or even $0). During the school year that meant I just had to make that stretch for dinner and the weekends — I had free school lunch. But in the summer, that made things quite a bit harder. One week, I had only a few jars of sprinkles left in the top of our pantry.
When I did have money for food, I had to buy it. Luckily there were a few restaurants and a large grocery store about a half-mile walk away. I still remember the first time I made that trip alone. It was snowing, I didn’t have a heavy coat and my brother didn’t want to go with me. I was scared, but eventually gave into the hunger and went and bought something at the grocery store. From then on I found a new freedom.
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Computers became my outlet away from all of this. In an effort to have more computer time to himself, my brother found a computer out by the dumpster, brought it in, and told me it was my computer now. I knew very little about computers at the time but I knew two things 1) I needed a wireless card. 2) I needed to get Windows ME off this thing (I didn’t know any of the passwords for the accounts). Luckily a kid at school and some people at church had mentioned Linux. I burned CDs for Fedora, CDs for Suse, but I couldn’t get either of them working. Then I learned about Ubuntu and their live CD. I got it working!
[…]I am forever indebted to these people. They weren’t all famous people, nor successful people. Some of them had companies that failed. Some of their blogs were obscure and lost to time. (I doubt I will ever find the tutorial for making a website in flash+php+xml+mysql that I once followed). I’m sure some of them felt like failures. Perhaps they didn’t get rich like they hoped, or popular, or never succeeded in changing the world. But they all had one thing in common, they decided to openly and freely share their work.
They may not have set out to share out of altrusitic motivations. I am certain they never intended to inspire a 12 year-old kid to find a better life. But it doesn’t matter their motivations. They changed my life. All I can say is thank you. Thank you for sharing your work. Thank you for your blogs posts, your tutorials, thank you for your slashdot comments, for your posts on digg. No matter how small your contribution, it mattered to me. You changed my life. Thank you.
Be kind.