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What was your gateway product to open source? (www.cnet.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/foss@beehaw.org
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I want to talk about our gateway products to open source. You know, that one product or software that made us go, "Whoa, this is amazing!" and got us hooked on the world of open source.

What made you to jump ships? Was it the "free" side of things like qBittorrent? Did you even know that some of your programs are open source before you got into the topic?

For me those products were:

  • Android
  • Firefox
  • VLC
  • Calibre

Am thinking to order some merch and I wanna make it more accessible to people unfamilliar with open source culture. Now, am looking for fairly normalized but still underrepresented product -- maybe it could serve as a conversation starter and push some people to open source

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[–] 5 points 3 years ago (2 children)

I came across Linux sometime in the late 90's. It was free (as in pricetag, which is all I cared about at the time) and different so I was curious. The PC I was using wasn't mine so repartitioning wasn't an option but I found some ready to go boot from dos linux distro and gave it a go. And I loved it! And still do.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    Same. I remember someone telling me about a group of people developing an operating system and giving it away for free because they didn’t like Windows. The idea seemed absolutely wild. It was enough to pique my interest so I bought a box with RedHat 5.2 discs and a book.

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