Why Open Source is Important (To Me)

As a kid, I was totally fascinated by computers. They were these magic machines capable of...well I didn't even really understand what they were capable of at the time. I just knew they were something special. My imagination ran free with the possibilities. Back then, it wasn't particularly common to have a PC, so I only knew a few friends who had one (not to date myself too much here). Any time I got to go over to the house of a friend with a computer, I was hopeful that we could spend some time playing on it. Of course, a number of my friends didn't have the same fascination with the machine as I did, so many times those visits resulted in no computer time. Or worse, at least in retrospect, were the visits were I would go play on their family's computer while they went off and did other things. Probably didn't make me the best friend in the world to abandon them once I got what I was after.