Being a creative person who participates in the digital age means that it is impossible to live without computer assistance. I do a lot with my computers, from graphic design to programming, from entertainment to blogging. As a child growing up in middle-class America I had Apple II at school and a Commodore 64 at home. Later I convinced my Mom to buy herself a Mac and I started playing around with Photoshop. By the time college rolled around, I ended up getting a used laptop for a couple hundred bucks and would graduate to more ram and megabytes every couple of years. And when I started studying in Germany, price and performance started leveling out and each successive laptop got smaller and faster. Whether Mac or Windows, one thing remained the same: Pirated software and operating systems. The thing is that I never really felt bad about doing it, and got used to weird error messages, product key generators, the occassional blue screen of death and so forth. There was just no way that I could afford to be creative – and the open source alternatives were on shaky foundations at best, so I thought. And then it happened. My windows laptop was totally slow and I was in the middle of a couple of projects so that all of my internal and external hard drives were full, all the SD cards were full and so were the thumbdrives and because every last megabyte was important, I decided to defragment my hard drive. With my finger hovering above the left trackpad button I paused, thinking about how long this would take and that there was nothing I could do on my computer. I pressed the button, closed up the gallery and decided to take a long walk in the park. Stupid windows, I said to myself. On the way, I went shopping and bought a new SD card for my IXUS and made some photographs of the ducks on the river and such. About an hour later I got back and it was still defragging itself. Camera still in hand I started taking macro pictures of the status-bar of the defragmentation waltz taking place on the screen in an absurd attempt to avenge myself or recycle my lost time… I decided I needed a vacation, and told my assistant that after I salvaged all the project files he could do whatever he wanted with the computer. When I came back I found out that my assistant had somewhere found a 30-day trial version of Windows. Over the next two weeks I thought continuously about buying a Mac or switching to Linux… And then – as usual – in the heat of working about 2 hours before midnight on the 30th day I remembered that the license was going to expire. (Because Windows told me every five minutes…) So I downloaded an Ubuntu CD, burned it and took a deep breath. Eight months later and I don’t regret the decision. I used free software (Imagemagick) on an open-source platform (Ubuntu) and got EXACTLY what I wanted without breaking any laws. I think that is actually the message that Firefox is spreading and that Add-Art is commenting upon and something echoed in the Creative Commons movement. In the light of RIAA trial judgements and Pirate Bay retrials, I think that it is especially important for those of us who struggling to survive that we learn to live without stealing…