[jjoe]

Perhaps it made him a "better" programmer but claiming to have made him a better "man" is a bit exaggerated.

I guess he's super excited about how far he's come and how programming helped him attain a certain level of satisfaction and happiness in his professional life.

[jaggederest]

Personally I can't see a path forward for me from high school till now without open source.

I own a home, stock, work a great job, have gotten to travel the world, and do exactly what I want to do for a job. Purely as a result of having the tools and instructional material I needed available libre on the internet.

I can't help but think that without that kind of alternative, dropping out of college would have sunk me for life - I'd probably still be working odd jobs in my hometown and living with my parents, no career, no future, depressed. I could even imagine an alternate present where I had enlisted in the military and gotten deployed.

[themodelplumber]

>OSS probably made me a humbler developer, too. I know what it means patching even small portions of code and I’m less harsh when posting bugs on others’ repositories.

That's definitely going to spill over into his day-to-day life, looking at my own experience. And such behavior does make you a better person.