How were you introduced to open source technology?

[Deanna]

With over 100,000 members - share how you were initially introduced to open source technology! We have varying stories, backgrounds, industries and skill levels that make up the fabric of this community, we would love to hear how your story began. 

This question is part of the 100K Member Contest - don't forget to kudo the original contest post to be entered. 

[Psehgaf]

When I was 16 years old I wanted to learn more about technology and software, but all the courses were very expensive, a friend recommended me to join a community, an open source community, that helped me improve my skills and knowledge, later at 18 a;os start a new community to support schools and students based on opensource

[AnandIyer]

In my earlier company our apps were loaded on WebLogic and WebSphere.  We had a legacy system and needed to migrate we tried to migrate them out and looking at alternatives. I learned about the open source project in the mid 2000's.My interested kind of piqued on using Apache Tomcat as a possible solution. We did ran some prototypes initially and were very happy with the results. The community was really awesome and helped us with our questions and issues that we faced during this migration. 

I really started liking the idea more so from the collaboration as well as the tooling perspective. It was really intersting time for myself and i graduated on other OpenSource Products and since then haven't looked back. 

We also had a very heavy Solaris/ HPUX / AIX server footprint in my company, due to the first migration, i was given a chance to port many of our systems to Linux. I even switched my personal laptop from Windows to Ubuntu and Firefox.     

[EmanuelHaine]

A friend of mine showed me a Linux distro and he thought me how to install on my personal laptop. After 6 years I started to work as a Support Analyst and I started to administer RHEL machines.

I am very grateful for having the opportunity to know open source technology because it presented me a world I wasn't aware of.

[Birba]

1992. my 1st GNU/Linux installation. Was a Slackware distribution with kernel 1.2.3 on a Intel 386. Impressed by the code available. I learnt a lot reading from kernel and other applications sources. I learnt techiques and best coding practice enjoing optimizing programs to best perform on, what we call now, ancient hardware. This is one of the great value of open source. I'm proud when I can contribute sharing my little pieces of code submit it to the community, get their feedbak and thinking someone else can benefit of it. 

[AlexNisulescu]

I was introduced to open source at collage, because we didn't have enough resources.
Later at my first workplace, almost everything was open source and I loved it because I could always try something new.

[ChristianFFM]

I started my carreer in 2003/4 with Unix as a Solaris-operator at an airline. After 2 years i changed to finance sector and still had some solaris-servers but gentoo-servers were the most at that time. During the years i changed all gentoo in mostly RedHat EL and some debian. That's were I am at the moment.

[Mahesh_R]

My journey starts by learning just by learning the python

[Arvind1]

I was fortunate to work at a company where the main project was hosted on Red Hat Linux and Jboss. Finding it difficult to hit the ground running with no relevant experience on those technologies, other than being a java programmer and hence ability to maintain and further build the JSP, servlets and beans. 

Further thanks to Ryan Lemos, who taught me the ropes of Linux. 

Thats my story. 

[johnpolanob]

Good morning, dear @Deanna

I started to get interested in open source technology while studying Software Engineering and AI at SENATI, where I discovered that many of the tools and technologies we used were open source. I immersed myself in the open source world and started contributing to projects on GitHub, which allowed me to learn and grow as a software developer. I love the community and collaboration that is fostered in open source technology, and I'm excited to continue contributing in the future.

[sreejithsnair]

I used to working in the Windows platform. Being an Engineering professional, it is always a challenge to get ourselves to out of the comfort zone and being adventurous, with a mission to improve our own standards and get updated. 

It was a plan to learn something new and explore new technology that paved way to learning Linux at first. Of course I wanted a change in my career, hence researched on various avenues, and hence got introduced to RHEL through training partner of RedHat. Got a little perpexed at the beginning, but later found it interesting when I completed the RHCSA, and now exploring Ansible by RedHat. Looking forward to exploring more products from RedHat and gaining RHCA certification.