Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

"I Love Free Software Day": Swipe (copy)left on dating apps

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 12th of February 2020 04:04:42 AM Filed under
GNU
OSS

Every year, Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) encourages supporters to celebrate Valentine’s Day as “I Love Free Software Day,” a day for supporters to show their gratitude to the people who enable them to enjoy software freedom, including maintainers, contributors, and other activists. It seems appropriate on this holiday to once again address how seeking love on the Internet is, unfortunately, laden with landmines for your freedom and privacy. But today, I’m also going to make the argument that our community should think seriously about developing a freedom-respecting alternative.

Read more

»

The FSFE's message

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 12th of February 2020 03:14:10 PM.

  • I Love Free Software - and you?

    While you are reading this, someone somewhere is improving the code of a Free Software you use for yourself. Free Software has long been part of the daily use of billion of users, still the people behind the respective projects often remain invisible. Together we want to change that. On 14 February is the "I love Free Software Day", a day to show your love and celebrate your favourite Free Software and its contributors. Join us!

    Behind every Free Software project is a team of developers, translators, designers, and other contributors. These are the people who fix bugs, improve the look and feel, and provide security updates. They do a great service to our society by making the sources of their work available to everyone and granting us the four freedoms. Day by day, a lot of people bring in priceless contributions, many of which do it voluntarily in their spare time. But how often do we actually thank them for this?

    This is what the annual "I love Free Software" day is made for. On 14 February, Free Software users around the globe show their appreciation for a project of their choice. It's easy to join in: just write a short message of thanks on the social network of your choice with the hashtag #ilovefs. Or write a short thank you email to a development team. The message does not have to be long - even a simple thank you is highly appreciated.

LibreOffice Loves Free Software

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 14th of February 2020 01:14:50 AM.

Show Your Love for Free Software

Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Friday 14th of February 2020 09:22:28 AM.
  • Show Your Love for Free Software

    In recent decades, Free and open source software (FOSS) has increasingly been the enabling factor for advances in areas we probably aren’t even aware of. If software is still spreading around the world, FOSS had already spread through the software world. All of that is only possible because of striving communities that push solutions forward with an amazing flow of continuous passion and love for nice technology, open knowledge, and supporting people. KDE is not any different - we have all been involved in such a lovely addiction for 23 years.

    Today, February 14th 2020, The Free Software Foundation Europe calls everyone to express their gratitude to all FOSS contributors around the world with the eleventh annual “I Love Free Software” campaign. It’s a day when we focus on drawing everyone’s attention to the amazing work done by thousands of FOSS contributors from many communities, most of them voluntarily dedicating their spare time to create high-quality software technology readily and openly available to everyone.

    What about you? Have you or your company/university been using Free software lately? Have you already thought about contributing back to that amazing FOSS community that creates the applications you use daily? It’s certainly a very rewarding and inspiring experience, with a lot of contributions made possible by people from different backgrounds.

Max Mehl (English): I love the hidden champions

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 14th of February 2020 06:42:02 PM.
  • Max Mehl (English): I love the hidden champions

    A few days ago I’ve sent an announcement email for today’s I Love Free Software Day to a large bunch of people. Most of the remarkably many replies have been positive and a pure joy to read, but some were a bit sceptical and critical. These came from Free Software contributors who are maintaining and helping projects that they think nobody knows and sees – not because these software pojects are unused, but because they are small, a building block for other, more popular applications.

    When we ask people to participate in #ilovefs (this year for the 10th time in a row!) by expressing their gratitude to contributors of their favourite Free Software projects, many think about the applications they often use and come up with obvious ones like Mozilla’s Firefox and Thunderbird, LibreOffice, their Linux-based distribution, or CMSs like WordPress and Drupal. Not that I think this is not deserved, but what about the projects that actually form the foundations for these popular suites?

    I researched a bit on my own system (based on Arch Linux) and checked on how many packages some of the aforementioned applications depend (including dependencies of their dependencies)1:

    Firefox: 221
    Thunderbird: 179
    LibreOffice: 185
    GIMP: 166
    Inkscape: 164

I Love Free Software on the go: the Replicant operating system

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 14th of February 2020 07:57:18 PM.
  • I Love Free Software on the go: the Replicant operating system in practice

    On I Love Free Software Day 2020 I’d like to pay attention to and thank the Replicant operating system, which is in active development and empowers users to use Free Software on the go.

    As a user with a non-technical background it was an honor and a privilege to attend the Replicant Birds of a Feather (BoF) meeting at FOSDEM 2020. There I concluded that my choice for Replicant not only helps the environment and strengthens the sustainability of my hardware, but also that the project is in active development and will support more contemporary hardware. At the end of the meeting the team handed out Replicant stickers on behalf of the Free Software Foundation, which you can join.

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

More in Tux Machines

Android Leftovers

Is open source software licensing broken?

Practices and expectations that one may have developed in working with conventional software licensing may lead to frustration when confronting open source software. The modest request, "Please, just show me the license" may be met with an unsatisfying response. While sometimes the response is very simple, often, the license information for open source software is more complicated and does not match the expectations set by conventional software licensing. What's up? Is open source software licensing broken? No. Differences, not just in the type of license terms, but in how the software is developed, lead to differences in how software license information is conveyed. In part, this results from tradeoffs between lawyer convenience and developer convenience. Read more

MauiKit Aims to Bring Apps That Can Run on Linux and Android

Creating the same apps and software for different platforms is not an easy task for the developers. To make an app run on desktops, developers need to write a source code. However, to make the same app run on mobile devices, the developers have to write a different source code. With the new MauiKit, developers would be able to build convergent apps, that can run on both platforms with the same source code. Read more

Games: Steam on Focal Fossa, osu! Comes to GNU/Linux

  • Canonical need a little testing hand for a newer Steam package on Ubuntu 20.04

    With Ubuntu 20.04 "Focal Fossa" being released in the next few months, the team over at Canonical are looking for a little help testing their updated Steam package. To be clear, this is only for the 20.04 release, they're not looking for feedback for earlier versions of Ubuntu. It's not a drastic change to the Steam package with it pulling in an update from Debian, but this newer build does have updated udev rules for some devices. Canonical also did some of their own tweaks for NVIDIA due to the differences between Ubuntu and Debian. You will need to use a temporary PPA which will be removed when the test is over, found over here. They need people to try clean installs without any Steam, upgrading from an existing Steam install and purge removals of the steam package. Additionally, testing with a Steam Controller and supported VR devices would help them too.

  • Popular free rhythm game 'osu!' now provides a Linux build with releases

    osu!, going under the current development name of osu!lazer is a very popular free rhythm game and they're now doing official builds for Linux gamers. It's actually inspired by an older game called Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, which was released in 2005 for the Nintendo DS. osu! was originally only available for Windows, then ported to macOS and eventually they started work on osu!lazer as an open source remake of the original client to eventually replace it. There's been various unofficial builds out there, since it's open source and up on GitHub but they're now making Linux a bit more official.

More on Tux Machines: About ● Gallery ● Forum ● Blogs ● Search ● News ● RSS Feed

Part of Bytes Media ● Sister sites below.

TechBytes Techrights button

Powered by Drupal, an open source content management system

Content available under CC-BY-SA CC

© by original authors

Powered by CentOS 6.5 (GNU/Linux), Varnish, and Drupal 6