So let's start with the dirty facts, I was born in 1970, after the first moon landing. Some scientists believe that over 500 years people will mark December 7, 1972, as the beginning of the second Middle Ages, because on that day the last humans walked on the moon. And no, I am not a boomer, considering I was born after 1965. But for me, all talk about generations, is a load of bollocks. There are people who can adapt to changes and people who cannot, and age does not play a role in this, it's all about mentality.
I grew up in a time of huge technological changes. My parents bought their first color TV, we got a landline telephone. But also our first Atari gaming system in 1978. Still imagine my grandmother, who was born in 1897, she saw the first car driving through the city, watched the Zeppelin Hindenburg fly over Tilburg, saw all the Belgian refugees flooding into Tilburg during the first world war, was part of the resistance in the second world war, but also sat before the television and watched the successful Apollo 11 mission: "The Eagle has landed". There has been no generation that has experienced so many technological advancements in their lives as the generation of my grandparents. As I discussed in my previous blog , the startup of the IT businesses worldwide was quite messy. Everybody started copying code, and there was no proprietary software.
When I went to High school (Odulphus Lyceum Tilburg) I went to one of the most modern schools in the Netherlands. This is a personal evaluation with hindsight, but I believe it's true. In our school, we had a computer room filled with Commodore 64 computers. Each Friday afternoon, we were allowed to sit and play/work with the computers. It was a time of sharing code, copying tapes, typing code from magazines, and experimenting. I was hooked, and my life changed forever. For us, there was no difference between Proprietary software and Open Source, we were 13 years old and having fun.
After saving some money and a final donation from my parents we got our own Commodore 64 computer in december 1983 and the journey really could start.
It was a time when we were busy copying both proprietary and open-source software. We developed programming skills to not only create our own software, but also to remove copy protections from proprietary software.
When I went to University in 1988 I got the possibility to work with Personal Computers, It were the days of no hard drive and booting DOS from a floppy. I bought my first PC in 1989. It was a time when we continuously upgraded our computers, switching hardware, extending memory, new video cards, and, of course, a modem to connect to bulletinboards.
In 1993, a friend of mine showed that he had installed a new operating system on an older pc. This operating system was Linux. For me, this was interesting enough to also install Linux on a second PC to start playing with it. At that moment I still had no clue about proprietary versus #foss #floss software. After finishing my studies, I became a professor of IT at a skills University. While in part-time running the Computer Recycle Factory, which was owned by the University. The computers we were recycling were destined for the poor, and we delivered them with Linux. This experience with Open Source software changed everything. This experience made me change the curriculum, which coincided with the launch of Ubuntu in 2004. Ubuntu offered gratis dvd's for students and professors, and we started with educating the students on Linux. It was the beginning of a real experience and struggle. We maintained our Linux education for about two years, when we were forced to switch back to proprietary software. At that moment, I didn't understand the reasoning, I was young and naive. Not understanding that Big Tech was paying the Universities to influence the curriculum.
The struggle continued for many years. Sometimes we had success, and a bit later the open source parts of the curriculum were removed. In 2006 I became a professor of bio-informatics, which was an entirely different world. In the biosciences, Open Source was the standard. I learned and experienced #foss #floss was a real option. In 2011 I changed my career to become a part-time professor of software engineering and a part-time entrepreneur. Again, it was difficult to use open source in the curriculum, but for me, I was still teaching Java and Python, which were both open source technologies. In 2017 I became a full-time academic entrepreneur, which enabled me to choose the projects and technologies I liked. This path led to the founding of OpenSource Science in December 2022.