It’s 14th February, better known to the world as St. Valentine’s Day. It’s therefore also time to say “thank you” to all free software users and developers on what’s also become the “I love FreeSoftware Day“, according to the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE).
The FSFE is asking all free software users to use the traditional day of love to think of the hard-working people contributing to the free software we all depend on.
Free software drives a huge number of devices in our everyday life. It ensures our freedom, our security, civil rights, and privacy. It enables everyone to participate in a fair society. However, everyone is different and people have different reasons to love free software.
Your ‘umble scribe relies on free software to play an active part in society and do his work. He’d therefore like to pay thanks to the following people:
- Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds for giving the world 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.
If you use free software too, why don’t you support this annual campaign, which can be followed on social media with the #ilovefs hashtag.