There are a myriad of reasons for using Free Open Source Software. They range from the technical to the political with a bunch of ethical, moral, strategic and functional reasons mixed in along the way.
But I think I’ve found a whole new type of reason for using FOSS/Linux. Medical.
As many might know, I have Bi-Polar disorder which has dogged me for many years. Many of the symptoms occilate with mood. However, one persistant danger never seems to go away, financial ruin. It’s an horrifically simple problem. In high (or “hypo”) moods, Bi-polar people tend to suffer from a need to go on spending sprees. Fueled by a destructive narcissistic deulsion that they have much greater resources than they have, mixed with heightened desires, the sprees can easily become self destructive. When the mood collapses, and the bills and extent of the folly kick in, it can terribly trigger or aggravate depression and often plays a major role in the suicide of Bi-polar sufferers.
One very well known sufferer of Bi-Polar, Stephen Fry, can attest to the power of this self-destructive complusion. Not to mention how often computuing and expensive gadgetry are one of the addictive causes of spending beyond means. Indeed, proprietry soft and hard ware anr almost ideally designed to take advantage of the downward spiral of the Bi-polar spending problem. You must have the latest shiny operating system. To run it, you need the latest shiny new hardware. While you’re in the shop, why not get the new games because they’ll run a treat on your new hardware. And so on until you’re too busy on Company of Heroes to answer the door to the bayliffs.
Luckily for me, a cure for this tech spending madness has found me. Linux. The amount I’m now sending now that I exclusively use Linux, compared to my Windows days, has plummeted dramatically. It’s a weird, but nonetheless welcome phenomenon. The OS itself costs nothing. If I get bored with one flavor, I just download a whole new one. That in itself is an epoch. A whole new bunch of shiny for no money. All the supporting software is free. You can buy expensive books for Linux, but it’s pointless because all the knowledge needed to do virtually anything (and I do mean pretty much anything) is also free online.
Then there’s hardware. Since getting Linux on all my machines, I have stepped off the upgrade treadmill. I do buy the occasional treat. But it’s much less frequent, and it doesn’t have to be the latest and greatest because an inbuilt trait of Linux is it’s frugality with resources. I’ve started getting 2nd hand stuff off ebay and re-using it rather new stuff.
I find it difficult to express how much escaping from that spending trap means to me. The next time I have a mood crash, it could even be the difference between life and death. If you contribute to FLOSS/Linux in any way, you have my sincere gratitude and thanks for this.
Related posts:
Loading ...
Follow Us!