Starting today we are going to start an effort to unite our community around our shared values and to document, promote and publicize any and all software, artwork, documentation, and supporting material that meets the Debian Free Software Guidelines. Contributions from other people in our community are greatly needed.
To begin with, we will start making lists of all the actively maintained operating systems, kernels, and utilities we have: editors, shells, compilers, games, graphics editors, spreadsheets, web browsers and email clients and hundreds of other things. At this point in time we have most things that normally come with a Unix or Unix-like system, plus many other useful things including community talks, presentations, events, and more.
We are not just limited to Unix programs. We intend to promote and feature all programs and software that are useful. We have multiple implementations of plenty of tools, on plenty of platforms, and we should highlight them all.
Thirty six years ago today in 1983, GNU was announced. Since that time, free and open source software and the web have taken over the world. Linux is used by millions of people, the internet and web are part of the daily lives of millions more and the fundamental beliefs of our community have spawned new ways of thinking about creative works in many different areas of our society. Thanks to the work of hundreds of thousands of individuals and dozens of organizations, we now have free and open music, movies, books, and encyclopedias, as well as software.
We have changes to make and new opportunities for freedom and openness await.
The next steps for the project will be to begin the effort to unite communities. We will be reaching out to many people and asking them to support this effort.
Get in touch, this is an ambitious project.
freesw@posteo.net (We need our own infrastructure, etc)
September 27th, 2019