What was the first free or open source software you used?

[Rui Pais]

The first open source software i tried was Red Hat 4.

We had a computer course on university with old Unixs.
They was very hard to deal to us, very used to dos command...
Saw a magazine with the RedHad Cd and tried.
I could managed to make printer print (not bad). My 14k modem (pure speed, lol), of course, never worked.
I work on it to get used to shell commands and forget it as the course was done.

Later when i got a new computer, it came with a lot of disc space, so i decided to give Linux just another tried. It was after a week of fighting the box, trying to install Win98 and W2k on it (the first was very bad but i had paid software specific for it...). My only mistake was that i always installed W2k first and that make w98 installation brake (Microsoft products seems to be generally incompatible with each other!)
Besides a lot of times installations frozen in the middle of process.

I was very irritated when i reboot with a RedHat8 (i think...) on it.
It failed almost at once and report that the device seems to be incapable of read the media correctly so installation would be aborted!
I almost scream. Then calm down, remembered the frozen installs, replaced the cdrom driver with the one from the old computer and things go well. That drive totally died 1 weak later on the old computer. At least Anaconda refused to work on it. Microsoft don't seems to do any test neither on media nor devices It would saved me a lot of time.

Installations of Linux was so simple as so easy, specially compared with the nightmare i had the weak before, that even before install ended i was converted! I quick upgrade to RedHat9, then move to other distros, never stop using Open Source software since then.

Never missed Windows, btw.

[saulgoode]

My first would probably be the Public Domain program SPICE (Simulation Program with IC Emphasis), coded in FORTRAN. We used punch cards to enter our circuit descriptions.

[SunnyRabbiera]

Mozilla vanilla, I think it was version 1.0 of it.
I didnt use firefox till it was version 0.7

[tigerpants]

An early version of audiograbber. After that, I tried to replace every MS and proprietary piece of software with freeware. It was a nice to have an entire windows based system with not one piece of paid for software bar a couple of games.

Still, it didn't stop windows being crap, hence the eventual switch to linux.

[bikeboy]

I think it was Firefox 0.7, although it may have been 0.6. The other possibility is Gaim 1.x, I found that while looking for alternatives to msn to avoid the ads that were in MS's client.

[Somenoob]

The first version of the VLC media player

[SlCKB0Y]

IN 2002 i started by
trying Red Hat Linux 7
and using firebird 0.2 (now known as firefox)

IN 2003 I
installed Mandrake 9.2 and have been using linux ever since.

I think you'll find 0.2 was known as Phoenix browser, later to become firebird and then firefox.

Mine would be Redhat 5.1 or possibly Caldera something or other. Both were in 1997.

[Erik Trybom]

I had heard of Linux before, but I tried it myself for the first time in 2002 when I leased a laptop from my university. It had some custom Red Hat 7.3 version on it called "Flying Linux". Í wasn't that impressed when comparing it to Windows 2000 (which was also installed on it), but at least I got to try it and everything worked, including the wireless network card.

We were forced to use Linux and Emacs in an early Java course, and I think Emacs was what actually made me read about the FSF and the GNU project. I didn't care much about it until later when I realized that GNU software generally was a lot better than the crap you got from Download.com.

In 2005 I decided to give Linux another try and chose Ubuntu, which I haven't regretted.

Edit: Wait a minute! I used ZSnes and CDEx long before that, without realizing what the GPL was. Could have been as early as 1998.

[claudex]

It was Firefox 1.5

[AndyCooll]

The first open-source app I can remember deliberately using would be Firefox (don't remember the version).

The first "free" app would probably be something like Winzip.

Of course, with both these answers I need to include a disclaimer. Since I've been using computers for many years I may well have been using an open-source app and never realised it for instance.