In less than two days, on February 14th, it’s I Love FS Day, a campaign started by the FSFE. This day is an opportunity to thank everyone who contributes in software projects that make it possible to compute in freedom. Our free operating systems and the applications we use on top of those, come from countless different groups and individuals designing, coding, testing, documenting, and maintaining the Software Commons. It’s easy to lose track of the human effort behind the free software we rely on.

The list of free software contributors I’m grateful to is endless, ranging from massive projects like GNU and OpenBSD to individual developers of special-use utilities, but for this I Love FS Day I want to especially thank the people who keep everything together: the package maintainers, the documentation writers, and the community managers. Our ecosystem wouldn’t succeed in its goals without its dedicated caregivers.

Thank you for contributing to free software, and especially thank you for maintaining a package, writing documentation, or making a software community safe and successful.