In English, the word free most often means without cost, but it can also mean without limitation. How interesting then that my introduction to the former would ultimately lead me to the latter.

It was the summer of 1996 and my home town had gotten its first public Internet service provider. A friend informed me that they had set up several computers at a travel agency in the mall for the public to try their service. I'd heard of the Internet, but I didn't really know what it was. Up until then, only students at the university and those willing to pay the long distance charges to connect to the nearest AOL number had been able to access the Internet.

At first I really didn't understand what I was doing, but once I learned that I could use a search engine to find anything I could think of, things really got started. In addition to finding information, I learned that I could download programs for free and take them home on three and a half inch floppy disks. I downloaded games whose names I've long since forgotten and file utilities for compression and other things. That fall, I began attending a high school that offered access to the Internet and the pace of my learning quickened.

This was my introduction to free, but it was also my introduction to copyright. Some of the programs I downloaded were freeware and some were shareware, but most of them included some kind of copyright notice. I began to understand that software was covered by copyright and that I had to have permission from the author to make copies. As a result, I became deliberate about selecting programs that the authors would allow me to use for free, because that was what I could afford.

I'd been teaching myself to program in BASIC since I was about eight years old and I'd taught myself to write elaborate DOS batch files when I was fourteen and fifteen, but I wanted to expand my skills. I was sixteen now and I wanted to learn C. I wasn't able to afford the $100 for a C compiler and I was dissatisfied with the only C compiler I could find for free on the Internet. However, I liked the assembler that came with it, so I spent the summer of my seventeenth birthday coding in assembly language until the wee hours of the morning. It was geek heaven.

After graduation, I began looking for an alternative to Windows. Not only were viruses and blue screens out of hand, but it was beginning to bother me that I was violating Microsoft's copyright by installing their software on my computer. There weren't many alternatives out there—certainly not many free alternatives. A friend showed me BeOS, but I eventually chose Linux. I had no idea where that decision would lead.

I installed RedHat Linux 5 on my computer and was immediately confused and overwhelmed. I had little or no documentation and no access to the Internet at the time. Later on, RedHat had improved and I had access to the Internet again. I began dual booting Windows 98 and Linux. For a couple of years, the more I learned about Linux the less I ran Windows, until one day I no longer needed Windows.

At this point it was still about cost and copyright compliance. Having learned Mac OS inside and out my last two years of high school (The school district even hired me to work in their lab a couple of times.), I'd have been comfortable buying a Mac to avoid viruses and blue screens. But $50 for a used computer was all I could muster at the time.

As I studied Linux, I began to learn what motivated so many talented programmers to provide their work to me for free. I knew RedHat offered a paid version of their product to businesses, but there was more to it than that. It was about liberty. There was the liberty my friend had to download and burn a copy of RedHat Linux for me when I wasn't able to do so for myself. There was the liberty I experienced in being able to use my computer without guilt or fear of retribution for violating copyright. And there was the liberty to use my computer in any way I see fit. (Some software—especially software that is discounted or free—comes with restrictions that preclude certain uses, including commercial or non-academic uses, or restrict how long it may be used.) But I would say that the greatest liberty of all comes from knowledge. The software I received gave me access to the wealth of knowledge on the Internet as well as the liberty to study how computers work from the very foundation (source code) on up.

I shudder to think where I would be without these liberties. I would have been forced to choose between computer illiteracy and criminal activity and I most certainly wouldn't be in business for myself. Along the way, there are many lives I would have been unable to touch and many people I would have been unequipped to help. Both in business and in my personal life, I'm committed to upholding the principles which have upheld me, the principles of open source.