Today I had a really nice experience, I was trying to implement webmentions on my blog, I had a vague idea about how to do it. Usually when I am trying to do something I do not know how, I read and read, and read more until I finally come to a solution, usually there is a lot of information on forums and blog posts.
There is a lot of information there, because people like to help others, people use their time to help others waiting nothing in return. The first time I saw it in my life was back in 2007 when I started using Fedora as my main OS, I had been in touch with Linux in 1998 when I worked for the biggest and maybe the first real ISP in my country. But using it as my main OS was hard in 2007, I needed a lot of help, so I subscribed to a lot of mailing lists. I got a lot of help there, and I started to help others too, then I started to post all my discoveries in a blog, as self notes, and for anybody to read them.
Back to today’s experience. I posted in the Mastodon network that I needed help, and one guy, Basil who just managed to implement webmentions on his own blog, and posted about it, decided to help me. He not only guide me, he actually made it work, he invested three to four hours in Sunday in order to help someone who is kilometers away, someone he has never meet in person. Why?, just because he is a good person.
Fortunately there are a lot of people like Basil, all this community we are part of which advocates for FOSS, who post regularly on forums and reply to mailing list, and blog about their findings waiting nothing in return, nothing but the nice feeling of helping others, and work on what we love, we love technology, we love to investigate and love to share our passion.
This is the FOSS spirit, this is what give us Linux, Docker, Apache, MySQL and a lot of other tools, tools we have for free, and tools we are free to use to help others.
These are though days, but if we keep this spirit alive we will have better days. Would not it be great if these kind of people were in charge of the labs looking for the vaccine we need, unfortunately the big corporations does not share this feeling.