The Microsoftie Who Embraced the Dark Side (Open Source)

“One day it just hit me — I should quit. There were no big
reasons, only a lot of little ones. I had just launched v1 of the
client and server side of Spot, and while it contained
sophisticated technologies, I didn’t really believe it would take
off in the marketplace. I had gained lots of knowledge yet only
understood the Microsoft world. I had made some good money, but I
had no time to enjoy it. Though my boss was happy with me, I was
losing motivation to just keep doing the same thing I had been
doing for over a decade. I looked around the company and saw a lot
of ancient codebases and unprofitable ventures.

“My mom didn’t approve of my quitting before finding my next
job, but I knew I could only properly figure out what was next
after I left.

“Little did I know what was in store for me.

“A few weeks after leaving, I decided to try Linux. I had played
with Firefox and OpenOffice for a few hours while at the company,
and even wrote an e-mail to our legal team telling them that my
friend Alex Mogilevsky’s patented work on background spell-checking
had been stolen by OpenOffice. But I had never used those apps
beyond my brief testing, and had never run Linux.”

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