[[!meta title="Nico Schottelius and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)"]] [[Nico Schottelius|about]], the author of this website, is a FOSS developer.

### How did he become a FOSS developer? In 1998 he was running Windows 95 on his brand new computer (Pentium 1, 166Mhz) and it randomly crashed. This was very frustrating. So he asked his father, whether there is something else. And his father gave him a set of SCO Unixware floppys and cds and a packet labeled "Suse Linux 11/94". The SCO package had a blue/white cd box and looked nicer, so he began to try to install it to his computer. But it did not work, because SCO did not support IDE disks and the computer had an IDE disk builtin. After about two weeks trying around with SCO, he gave up. Frustrated he continued to use the old operating system. About one week later he was again extremly frustrated, that this operating system was crashing so often and he remembered, that there was another cd set (one source code, one install cd) to try out. After about 4 hours he had Linux running. That was really really easy compared to SCO. It felt strange, so new, so fast. And it contains only text. Strange, like DOS before Windos, he thought. On the next day he read in the book that there is something called "X11" available, which can destroy the display, when wrongly configured. He was shocked, but still tried to do it the correct. He searched for vertical and horizontal refresh rates and found them after some hours searching in the handbook (they were labeled differently compared to the SuSE Linux handbook). Created the configuration and typed in "X<enter>". Wow, it works. But why is it grey and black? Really gross. But after typing 'startx' it looked much better.

The next confusing thing was that there were no drivers for the cdrom. Nothing to load. After about two weeks he found out that they are already integrated into the kernel and that one simply needs to "mount" them. And after that experience, he was totally convinced by FOSS, because the FOSS people solved the driver issue much cleaner than the cdrom vendor or Windos itself. The whole system has been running very stable and it has been really easy to change things (like /etc/issues), it has been open. [[!tag schottelius net]]