In my last article I talked about how interest leads people to program. Then life rose up behind me like a giant Doberman pincer and bit me on my backside; so, I didn't think of programming for over four months. However, just this week something happened that made me want to program again.
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13 years 35 weeks 5 days 24 min ago
GNU is Freedom
I was naught but a wee child, 8 years of age I was. I ran a Windows 3.1 machine and played shareware DOS and Windows games on the machine. In course of my adventures, I came upon a tool that helped me with my shareware gaming addiction - GNU Tar for Windows.
I read the licence for GNU Tar and understood the main points: you, the user, have the freedom to study, tinker and share this program as you wish. This was contrasted to the licences of the games I played: share my program with thy neighbours and thou shalt not do anything useful to improve my program. Instead, ye shall tender me some currency lest ye be labelled a pirate.
It was obvious to me that there was greater freedom in GNU and free software.
I did some research and found computer programs are written by computer programmers using a programming language. I learned that computer programmers were expensive so I couldn't ask one to make me some games; I knew that I had to learn this art for myself.
Thus, I began my quest for knowledge - knowledge about the mystical art of programming.