Was reading this article, and it got me thinking. There’s lots of people who are happy to complain at length, but what if we made it a point to pick a particular day each year to express our collective gratitude for the work people do for FOSS?
Whether in the form of donations or kind words (maybe even joining a project), it might be something that helps keep people going on the things they love but for which they don’t get a lot of appreciation.
Curious to hear y’all’s thoughts.
Edit: Someone mentioned I Love Free Software Day, which is cool that it exists. I like the idea behind it, but I’m hesitant to piggyback upon a well-known holiday, for fear of being wholly overshadowed (Valentine’s Day is already stressful enough for some people).
With money? Yeah. Otherwise, don’t bother.
While I understand the sentiment, I have run across developers that explicitly state they don’t want money as thanks. They want encouragement or volunteers, instead.
Also, if that’s how we approached it, the poor among us would be excluded, and that’s far from my goal with this idea.
I haven’t put out any FOSS yet because I’m still writing a lot of “wtf is this” code but once I can I really want to try to hold myself to the idea of “I do this in my free time, so I provide it for free”
There’s that old adage:
Seems people mostly want Cheap and Good, so they just have to deal with results not being quick.