It’s India’s 78th Independence Day today. I’m not someone who attaches a lot of special meaning to public holidays, but thinking about freedom this morning got me thinking about free software and the impact it has had on my life over the past 10 years.

I still remember trying to install Linux Mint in the middle of the night back in 2014. I had recently picked up Bjarne Stroustrup’s Programming: Principles and Practice using C++ from my school’s library and after attempting to run my first few programs on Windows, I decided to give this Linux thing a try.

This was my first encounter with Linux and the GNU system, and even though I was in way over my head back then, I loved every bit of it.

Fast forward to high school, I discovered an authentication bypass vulnerability in my coaching institute’s website. I wrote an exploit for the bug in Python with a browser-automation tool called Selenium, a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy.

I fooled around with lots of free tools in college - e.g. this blog is built with Jekyll, I used OpenJDK and Gradle when I started contributing to ZAP, etc. And ever since I’ve started programming professionally, the list of free libraries, tools, projects, and programming languages that I’ve worked with is probably too big to include here.

All this to say, it’s so easy to take free software for granted, but without the people behind them, the software industry probably wouldn’t exist as we know it today. Thanks to free software, free knowledge, and the internet, even someone like me who was born in a third-world country, was able to grow up in the awe and fascination of computers.