When it changed (1998?)
Anthropologist Biella Coleman just posted “1998 and the Irish Accent is Why I Study F/OSS”. She quotes a rumination by Don Marti on 1998 as a crucial and strange year in tech:
…there was all this fascinating news and code for 
recruiting new hackers at the same time that there
 was a huge power grab intended to drive hackers out.
Biella tells her own 1998 story as well:
…that was the year I ditched my other project and decided to go with F/OSS for my dissertation….I let the idea go for a few weeks, possibly months until one Very Important Conversation over coffee transpired with an Irish classmate…
So I asked my co-bloggers to tell us whether 1998 was a pivotal year for them, too. For most of us, it was.
Kirrily Robert
At the beginning of 1998 I took my first real open source job. Oh, sure, I’d been using Perl in my previous two, but this job (at the Monash University Computer Centre) was the one that changed me from being an isolated user of open source (or “free software”, to be more exact; the term “open source” was not yet widely known) to a passionate advocate and a member of the wider open source community. Monash had just bought a monolithic “messaging system” that encompassed email, bulletin boards, shared calendars, and the like. They’d looked at various vendor solutions, but the computer centre’s Unix nerds had insisted that whatever they went with, it had to support open standards: POP, IMAP, LDAP, and so on. They ended up going with Netscape Suitespot, and I was hired as a Perl developer to do integration scripting, especially around the LDAP directory service.
My job at Monash was the first one where I was allowed to run Linux on my desktop. I’d previously run it at home (Slackware 1993-1995, Red Hat around 1995-1997), but my employers had always insisted on Windows. That January of ’98, for the first time, I installed Debian. I was blown away by apt-get and never looked back; Debian and then Ubuntu have been my choice of linux distro ever since. The university also provided me with an account at the on-campus bookstore and certain amount of time for study, which I chose to use for self-guided study. Me and a couple of the other computer centre guys used to hit up the bookstore for as many O’Reilly books as we could find, print out stacks of RFCs, and go sit outside under a tree and mainline them. I learnt a lot that way.
1998 was also the year I attended my first LUG meeting, with the newly-founded Linux Users of Victoria, whose website looked like this at the time (via the Wayback Machine). Towards the end of 1998, Monash was again looking at buying a monolithic vendor solution for online coursework. Sun and IBM, if I recall correctly, were trying to sell us their offerings with truly enormous pricetags. During some slow time, I was trying out new CPAN modules and thought that this thing called HTML::Mason looked interesting. It was in alpha or beta at the time, but I messed around with it and mocked up a front page (or “portal” as we said back then) for an online learning website. I showed a few people, who showed a few other people, and the university quickly realised that they could build their own courseware system better and cheaper than the vendor solutions. So they ran with it, and it became My Monash, and won awards and stuff.
My 1999 was completely different — I left the university started my own open source training and consulting business — and since then I’ve worked for open source companies or on projects using open source software almost exclusively. 1998 was definitely the tipping point.
Liz
1998 wasn’t a big change for me. I was doing web and database development and wiring up buildings in a K-12 private school that’s part of the University of Chicago, teaching classes on web and email use, and doing freelance web dev. In mid-year, I started working as a programmer analyst for the University of California. For that job, I needed more Perl than just writing a couple of web forms. My department sent me to the Perl Conference in San Jose, which was vaguely exciting, but didn’t pull me into any particular communities.
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