Preface

No AI slop nor assist used. Just a stream of consciousness writeup of what started out as a ranty Hackernews comment but became something more of an essay on one reason why I love open source software (or free software but I don’t need that discussion) so much and why this freedom tech thing is so important to me. Since I don’t want to associate my ancient HN handle with my npub I decided in favor of posting it to nostr exclusively. (Writing titles is hard btw.)

It’s either real education or replaceable drone programming, you can’t have it* both ways (*remember the cake)

I didn’t study but did a very low effort take on the German “dual trainee” thing where you spend 3 days employed as an apprentice at a company and 1 1/2 days at a “technical” school. It was riddled with Microsoft, Oracle and Cisco stuff in all curriculums and they went hard on the OSI model. Tests were often screenshots of Windows Server GUIs where you had to fill out emptied out fields and select which button you’d push. It felt like being handed toys in various forms that had to be put into fitting holes. Really bizarre experience. I didn’t attend school much after a year because my boss was flabbergasted by the nonsense we got to learn at school (we had to hand in weekly reports about topics covered at school) so he just stopped responding to the teachers calling.

I made it my mission to (re)build anything we had to do for some exercises and tests using open source stuff only. Some of my class mates let me know about what was required to pass the tests and as long as I could accomplish it with open source stuff, I’d attend and submit my solutions. Always ended with lots of debate and conflict but at least they stopped calling at work because they were happy when I didn’t show up and made a mockery of their system. Setup BGP routing? Hello OpenBSD with whatever BGP application was fashionable back then. I think I remember it being OpenBGPD. Active Directory stuff? LDAP. It wasn’t always fun and it cost me many sleepless nights reading terribly formatted mailing lists and applying random git patches I stumbled upon here and there but I learned a lot. I always found something that was feature complete enough to work. (That or I just didn’t care enough and slept in. 🌚)

At some point I convinced my boss to completely stop competing with other companies on Windows Server hosting and go all in on Linux virtualization. The product would’ve never scaled and worked as well if we had settled on HyperV instead of kvm. We also could focus on building out one product category instead of supporting various other stuff others already offered due to some Microsoft partnership. It was a blast. I never really learned anything Microsoft and I hated every interaction with their products on customer systems. Their database GUIs were atrocious. Same goes for Oracle stuff or that super slow and ugly Packet Tracer app by Cisco. (I even ran some slow Packet Tracer alternative that emulated Cisco hardware on x86 - it was terrible but it worked to complete the required tasks. Could’ve used some zen back then.)

At least the final tests to get the degree were vendor neutral and mostly focused on generalized components and fundamentals. We also had to write up a report about a real project of ours at out e employers which we had to submit for rating before getting the degree. I got to sell a few proprietary firewalls we decommissioned because we had no use for them anymore and I got them as a present for some tax free cash. 🌞

I wouldn’t last anywhere if I were forced to learn PowerShell or SQL Server stuff. I just can’t. I learned the very basics to migrate stuff away from these systems for some clients though.

Letting schools be breeding grounds for corporate drones (not attacking anyone, I’m not saying it’s working as perfectly as these companies hoped) is doing lots of damage to anyone’s economy if they’re not the US but even there it just leads to feeding the tech oligarchy and Israel’s AI surveillance neo-Sanhedrin technocracy system.

People would be much more inclined to learn something they could use and modify for free (even commercially) during and after school/university/work instead of being tied to whatever I’d being offered by some proprietary vendor. It’s a hinderance to creativity, sovereignty, freedom and economic growth, plain and simple. Once you rent/license from a US company abusing the EU for tax haven purposes you’ll never reach any infrastructure sovereignty whatsoever and you’ll never grow the talent and culture required to manifest it into existence. See GaiaX and similar nothing burgers.

At some point even my teachers were asking me to give paid Linux lectures out of some tiny fraction of after school activity education funding they could get. It was obvious how disgruntled they were about having to approach me to do it. People in my class loved that stuff even if it meant working an hour longer after school was over. I guess it paid out to be the annoying “I’m not going to play this game” prick who tended to be quite arrogant despite his naivety.

I got sucked into Google’s ecosystem for a while though because at the time they seemed like the perfect mix of open source stewards and systems engineers paired with a tiny bit but of counter-cultural attitude for such a behemoth of a company (at least during their first years). I turned a blind eye towards their documented intelligence ties and the obvious advertising Kraken hiding beneath the veil of that image. I slowly started abandoning them when they started to really decline around 2016 and since then I’ve been helping companies leave that ecosystem as well.

Got some of them to use Linux even on desktops or go back to on-premises and helped build the teams needed for these projects. You have to be really lucky to have someone on your side at these companies, which is difficult if many only know Microsoft 365, Azure and all the other proprietary crap that exists around that ecosystem.

Which brings me back to vendors being excluded from publicly funded schools, though that’s not going to happen in my lifetime. Not giving into pipedreams here but nostr, Bitcoin and everything happening around this ecosystem is giving me a tiny bit of hope of finding ways to bring young people towards a path to more freedom.