Linux really blew my mind as a kid. It showed me what real computers could do, and i have had many, many adventures under a linux house of one distro or another

Linux really blew my mind as a kid. It showed me what real computers could do, and i have had many, many adventures under a linux house of one distro or another. I know I would not be anywhere today without linux. Lets see if I can come up with a list of everything i've used linux for: * Routers * DNS server * Email servers * VOIP PBX (still crazy that asterisk let me build my own PBX) * Web Servers * Monitoring * Virtualization * Desktops (I do all my dev in a linux VM) * Honeypots * data recovery liveCD * Automation * failover (DRBD) * IRC server * Print server * File server * Media center A lot of those would simply not have been feasible for a kid to do in his basement with old computers. Most of that list wasn't otherwise economically feasible to do on windows, or possible. Slackware taught me a lot. I really had to get my hands dirty there, and was using that as my secondary desktop for the later years in high school. And linux is certainly how I got into programming, via perl, bash and php. And thats what I do for a living now, as a rails dev (thanks DHH!). I NEVER would have thought that a kid (this kid) with developmental disabilities could be a programmer; i flunked out of programming in HS pretty early into it. The deepest of thanks to linus, and everyone that has created or contributed to open source projects. The socioeconomic impact of your work is beyond measure, all because you put sharing and collaborating with people around the world before profits. I hope you take a step back from time to time and look at it anew; its an unprecedented and wonderfully human thing; Open source represents the best parts of us.