I first got into Linux about ten years ago, but I couldn't understand how the development model could even work.  The whole "Free Open Source Software" thing, with people volunteering to perform development work, just seemed too much like socialism, which of course has always been an abject failure.

Now though, I understand that the FOSS movement is more like an extended form of capitalism.  Everybody who works on it is doing so for self-interest, even if it's just to get some street cred as a programmer in order to prepare for a high-paying career.  (I even profit from it myself, due to my business as a Linux trainer.)

I've never been a huge fan of Microsoft, partly because of their unethical business practices and partly because they've never had the best products.  In the pre-Linux era, I tried out Windows 3.1 when I finally got a computer that could run a GUI-based operating system.  I was so unimpressed that I went out and bought a copy of OS/2, and never looked back.  Nowadays, I'm forced to use Windows for some things.  But, most of my computing needs are met with Linux, which I'm using right now.

I discovered Linux back in 1995. At the time, I was working for a datacenter that used SGI Irix, and I had a similar conversation with my manager about using GNU/Linux instead of SGI's proprietary offering. She said, "we don't want to because we need a company to be accountable, which offers service, et al." At the time, there really wasn't too much in the space (I think RedHat showed up a few years later).

It is interesting to see how far it has come. Right now, I'm using Firefox under Ubuntu Linux to compose this comment. My Android phone is running embedded Linux. As you say, it's all over the place!

A few years later I wound up reading Eric S. Raymonds' "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," and was blown away by the concept of open source in general. Up to that point, I kept running into naysayers, who maintained that open source was inherently insecure and there is no way one could make money with it.

Here, Raymond turns those specious arguments on their respective sides:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/

funny how we get to some stage, and we´re all just collectively ready for the next thing, like voluntarism. I hear Linux is a good thing from people who know about such things but I can not remain awake until the end of the sentence to find out why, usually.
You did a good job, Tom kept me awake all the way to the end

This is an analogy that had never occurred to me.  People think voluntaryism is some niche thing that will never catch on because it lacks visibility - they don't know how many voluntaryists there are.  People think Linux is a niche thing because so few home computers are running it and they think that's all that counts.

Hear, hear! Well said. Humans are bad at conceiving exponential growth because it's not something we have evolved hardware for because we did not encounter it in nature. The exponential growth we are just a couple decades away from in terms of superintelligence and automation is going to radically reshape our world. Closed, archaic systems like government can not evolve quick enough to survive. What took 25 years for linux will take a fraction of the time for the technologies coming and the freedom they will unleash.

Hey Tom, open source, Linux, and Voluntaryism are my favorites! I hope you are right!