Why I Switched to Open Source

My journey from a proprietary advocate to an open source idealist.

When I was in college, I was a die-hard for proprietary software. Microsoft and Apple were the leaders of this showdown while Linux and Google were my mortal enemies.

I had a strong dislike for anything open source because I cared deeply about security and privacy. In my mind, evil-doers would look at open source and either make changes to the code to make it vulnerable or find vulnerabilities in the repository and exploit them to gain access to my computer.

I stuck with the pre-built apps and knew that if I paid for commercial proprietary software, I would be safe from all those evil-doers.

Reports of all of the malware on Android phones and the opposing lack of malware on iPhones only justified my beliefs so much that I wrote an argumentative paper in Composition II on why proprietary software was better than open source.

My teacher was surprised. “Normally I have to listen to students defending open source,” she said, adding more fuel to the fire that drove me to cherish proprietary software. I was so adamant that I even shut down people who argued against me at the end of the essay.