I've Been Promoting Free Software for Over 25 Years
I wrote my first computer program when I was about 14, maybe a little younger (I still have visual memory of it). I was very passionate about computers since a very young age and I wanted to make programs/games of my own. Nobody in my family could help me, certainly not my parents, as they hardly touched computers. I needed to rely on childhood friends (offline).
So I put my program on a floppy disk and shared it with classmates. It didn't do anything too witty and since I hadn't yet learned PASCAL my program used GOTO statements instead of more advanced constructs. But you know 90s kids... this was before it became possible to have Internet at home unless a parent was very hardcore and/or an industry insider. PCs didn't came with modems in them.
At the time I knew nothing about GNU or the GPL. I knew about "Linux", but only one friend of mine actually used it at home (his father was to 'blame'; he worked in IT). Some years ago I got in touch with that friend again; he's working in IT, just like his father did.
The curious thing is, nowadays more people know about GNU and adopt the GPL. Even teenagers are vaguely aware of the key concepts. In the later 90s many knew about "Linux", wrongly assuming it all started in the early 90s in Helsinki. By the way, on the left that's a photo of mine from more than 25 years ago (I'm 16). When I started university (aged 18) one of my first friends if not the very first friend in Computer Science was a Finn. He told me "Linux" started in Finland. To be fair, he didn't seem aware at all of GNU. To him, it was just some kernel. He was an exchange student doing military service in Finland and a year later he left Manchester and we lost contact.
When I wrote programs in university I started sharing them in my site. Not the site I made when I was 16; when I was 19 I made a more proper site, a site about myself, and over time I added a lot of source code to it. Initially there was no licensing information (I didn't understand copyleft), but I corrected this later. That was when I used CVS (and later SVN). A few years later I became highly ranked (even #1 in the world) for some of my code contributions. That's in the past anyway...
Sharing code always made sense to me. What's the point hiding or 'hoarding' it? Unless the code is so poorly written that it would become an embarrassment when seen by others. In 2002 or 2003 I went to a job interview in a Swedish company and one of the things they asked for was printed code listings of a large program that I wrote. The program's source code was already in my site, visible to everyone, so I had made sure it was nice and tidy. If it was proprietary, I'd probably have no incentive to do so (perfecting the indentation, properly modularising the .C and .H files and so on).
Free software isn't some thing that I "discovered" per se. It's just something that I always did, even if as a teenager I didn't use that term (I didn't say "Open Source", either). █