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 DATE : 2020.02.27
 TIME : 09:56
AUTHOR : [email protected]
TITLE : BACK SEAT DROP OUT

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My name is dave. I am 53.5 years old and I've been using linux and
only linux on all my personal computers for 25 years. Before linux
I used dos, windows, and os/2. Before windows, I played a lot of
DnD. Before DnD, I wore out a trs-80 entering programs in BASIC
from magazines and before that I played a lot of games on an atari
2600.

I graduated Clemson University with a degree in Food Science in the
late 80s. I took one FORTRAN class in college, and didn't even know
that I had an email address the entire time I was in college.

Shortly after getting my first full time job after getting my
degree, I bought a computer. I spent a lot of time on BBS's before
I got my first dial-up account with an ISP (netcom). It was 1991
when I was first exposed to telnet, ftp, gopher, archie, news
groups and the WWW. I puttered around on my dial-up connection on
dos, then windows, then OS/2, and finally a beta version of windows
NT playing shareware games, and hanging around on BBS's. One day in
1995 I installed linux on a spare old computer. It was a spare
computer, not my main computer because the "win" modem wouldn't
work. After re-compiling the kernel and getting the modem to work,
everything changed; I put linux on my main computer, wiping
windows. I've run nothing but linux (and very briefly freebsd), on
all my computers ever since.

On dial-up, linux didn't really feel like a community. BBS's felt
like a community on dial-up because everyone was using the same
computer. But linux on dial-up only sort of felt like a community.
I learned all I could by downloading daily digest of the the redhat
and kernel mailing lists and perusing related newsgroups and
reading books. Downloading distros and updates was painfully slow,
but dial-up was all I knew. I existed like this on my dial-up
connection, learning all I could in what felt like isolation. No
one I knew in real life used linux. I had no one to talk to about
linux. I wanted to talk to people about linux because it was
exciting to me.

In 1998 I went to the Atlanta Linux Showcase and saw for the first
time that there were people in real life like me that used linux
and that there was actually a community of linux users. I knew
there were people who used linux and knew that they were probably
passionate about it like I was, but I had never met any of them. I
wanted to be part of this community. I saw "famous" people I "knew"
(knew of) there. There was swag, and books, and t-shirts. I was
shy, for lack of a better term. I didn't feel like I belonged
there. I didn't study computer science in college. I wasn't a
developer, or a sys admin. I was an outsider, or so I thought. I
remember that at the COMPAQ booth they had a stack of LINUX 1999
license plates that they were giving away. When I asked if I could
have one, they asked me if I was developer.I said no, and they told
me that they were just for developers. I don't remember how, but I
talked them in to giving me one anyway, and I still have it today
on the front of my car.

On my drive home from the Atlanta Linux Showcase I was excited
about what I had experienced, and the free swag I had gotten, but I
was also a little more convinced that I was an outsider. I sort of
felt like I belonged, but I sort of knew that I didn't.

I went back to the Atlanta Linux Showcase each year until they
stopped having them. At some point I upgraded my dial-up to DSL and
also joined my local LUG. I was more connected, and felt more like
I should be a part of the linux community. In the early 2000s I
drove 10 hours one way, in the first of many trips to the Ohio
LinuxFest. On my drive home I told myself I could be a part of this
community. I felt empowered to be part of this. I was already in a
LUG, I had already submitted bug reports for some open source
programs I had used, I had a self-hosted linux web page on a sparc
box, there was really nothing stopping me from becoming part of the
linux community except my own self-inflicted case of impostor's
syndrome.

So, one day in December 2005 I recorded my first linux podcast. I
did 137 episodes. I became a co-host on The Linux Links Tech Show,
I did live mumble call in shows from my car during my daily
commute. I did an interview with stankdog announcing the start of
Hacker Public Radio, I contributed to Hacker Public Radio, I got to
go to Google as a member of the "press" for a KDE launch event, I
talked to my LUG about having a linuxfest in the SouthEast US, and
I became the President of the SouthEast LinuxFest Foundation for
the first two years of it's now 11 year existence.

After all of that in 2011, just after the 2nd SouthEast LinuxFest,I
was exhausted, and resigned my post as President of the SouthEast
LinuxFest, and dropped out of the linux community. I was still
passionate about linux, but I needed to be just a user, not a
contributing member of the community. The reason for my leaving was
that my participating in the community was preventing me from being
able to spend the quantity of time that my wife and two daughters
needed from me. I did miss it, being part of the community, the
friends I made, but I could still enjoy and use linux without
participating at the expense of my family.

In 2019 I was asked to do one of the keynotes at the 10th SouthEast
LinuxFest. I agreed and gave a talk. It was surreal, re-introducing
myself to a community that I loved, actively participated in, and
then willingly left. In some ways it was like my first exposure to
the community, in that a lot of the people there didn't know who I
was. What was different though, was that I knew something that I
didn't know before; this community doesn't care if you think you
are an impostor, and they welcome your participation. The talk I
gave was directed to the one person who may have been in attendance
there for the first time, feeling like they didn't belong but
wanted to belong anyway. The message I wanted to communicate to
that person was this: if I have learned anything from my experience
with the linux community, it is that it is filled with people who
are passionate about the same thing that you are, and that if you
are passionate about something people will listen to you when you
talk about it, and they will encourage you to participate with
them.

I am still a back-seat, dropped out former community member who is
just a linux user now, but I feel pretty good about that.

--norris

(o\_!_/o)

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