Today is 14th February. Most people know this as Saint Valentine’s Day, when florists are overworked and restaurants overcharge. 😉
However, every year 14th February is also I Love Free Software Day.
It’s the day when free software users are encouraged to say thank you to the people that produce the great software that millions of people and businesses use and rely upon every other day of the year.
I’d therefore like to express my love for free software and say thank you to:
- Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds for giving us the GNU/Linux operating system;
- The Document Foundation for LibreOffice, the best free office productivity suite;
- the Gimp team for a great graphics package;
- Mozilla for the Firefox browser;
- the Tor Project for secure internet browsing;
- the VideoLAN team for the VLC media player;
- the Free Software Foundation and Free Software Foundation Europe for their advocacy work; and
- all the other free software developers and package maintainers who are too numerous to mention.
Along with the rest of the world, I’m indebted to you all.
If you use free software too, support this annual campaign, which can be followed on social media with the #ilovefs hashtag.