How I started my free and open-source sofware journey?

I began to tinker with free and open-source software (FOSS) in 2005, the second year of my employment with the UM Bansalan College, when the National Bureau of Investigation (https://nbi.gov.ph/) circulated memorandums against software piracy.

I came to know Bayanihan Linux, a Linux distro forked by the Department of Science and Technology Advanced Science and Technology Institute (https://asti.dost.gov.ph/) from a Debian-based platform. Bayanihan Linux is a Filipino effort of contributing to the FOSS community, an attempt to address the high procurement cost of Windows systems.

There were challenges in deploying such a distro. First, downloading the 700MB installer package took ample time, almost a day, due to limited internet infrastructure. The fastest internet is a DSL line at about 10 Mbps at that time, with many concurrent users connected to the internet service. Imagine the kbps in download speed. Second, the hardware requirements of the OS were way too high for the current inventory of computers I had. I ran it on a 32MB RAM, Intel Pentium 2, 20GB HDD, and an 8MB VRAM PCI Video card machine. It was way too laggy. Third, the OS is new to me, the interface, the commands, and functionalities are way different from what I used - Windows 95 and Windows 98. The learning curve is again, too long. But, because it is FREE, I persevere to learn and use it.

That's it. That's the story as to how I met FOSS, the Bayanihan Linux.