I Love Free Software Day 2025

14. February 2025

It's been a long time since I wanted to share a list of FOSS projects I really enjoy. Today is prefect for this, because it's I Love Free Software Day.

This list would be enormous, if I would really cover every FOSS project I love and use. So I decided to limit this post to three projects and repeat this process every year on the 14th of February.

Lichess

The web can be full off ads, privacy invading trackers and proprietary software. Lichess is the opposite of this and offers free (as in free beer and free speech) online chess. You can play it on Android, iOS and in the Web as an anonymous player or with an account. All features are available for free, even post-game evaluation with Stockfish in the cloud. The only difference to users that have donated to the project, are wings near the user name.
As of today, and I really didn't expect this, my account states "Time spent playing: 34 days, 23 hours", and many more to come!

The projects uses mainly copyleft licenses like GPL and APGL and is a registered French non-profit. It has no Contributor License Agreement and this makes the project truly Free Software and resistant to for-profit take overs.

To support the Lichess, you can donate and contribute.

Godot

The Godot Engine is a MIT licensed game engine capable of 2D and 3D graphics. It also has a innovative game design philosophy, that makes game development a real joy. In a nutshell, a Godot game consists of scenes, that can have multiple nodes connected trough signals. A scene might be the game menu screen, a node the play button and the signal would be the button press action.

This is just a guess out of the wild, but I think the gaming industry is one of the biggest "non-free" software ecosystem out there. One of the most notable exceptions are Lichess and Godot, of course :-)
I strongly hope this will change in the future and there will be more Free and Open Source games and tools.

The Godot Foundation is a Dutch non-profit organization. Also here, no Contributor License Agreement exists. So this project thrives to remain free and open to it's community for a long time.

To support the Godot Engine, you can donate and contribute.

Codeberg

The last year I started to host the source code of my projects on Codeberg, a community driven and open-source git platform. I still push my code to the proprietary octopus-branded git platform, but Codeberg is my new origin.

Behind the scenes it uses Forgejo, a Gitea fork, that the Codeberg organization created, after a for-profit company took it over. So if someday, you want to host your own "Codeberg" instance, you actually can by hosting a Forgejo server.

Similar to Lichess and Godot, also Codeberg is a registered non-profit association in Germany and has no Contributor License Agreement. All the source code of Forgejo has the AGPL license, making it also a real Open Source project.

To support Codeberg, you can donate and contribute.

Spread the love

Free Software projects often don't promote themselves much, because of small budgets, missing marketing skills or they simply don't want to. That makes it so important, to celebrate days like this and show the world what Free Software is and why it matters. And also on every other day of the year, we can recommend free and open alternatives, especially to non-technical people. Organic growth is the best way to bring new people to this community.
We all know how your family and friends can't wait for the moment, you finally install them Debian on their machines ;-)

With this, I want to thank the whole Free Software community and the ones that will join today.

Every feedback is welcome

Feel free to write me an email at info@simondalvai.org and comment on Mastodon or HackerNews.