This time of year it is easy to get swept up in the purchasing frenzy that comes from Black Friday and Cyber Monday. There’s nothing wrong with loving a good deal, but this also presents us with the perfect opportunity to support those companies who do things we value, like contributing to the Open Source Initiative, or supporting the open source community in some way.
Scrolling through my social media feed today, I’m seeing tons of items that benefited from the open source community, being advertised like crazy. Think about it it for a moment. This holiday, many of you will be buying tiny quadcopters that blossomed out of the open source community. When those quadcopters break, tons of you will be 3D printing replacement parts on desktop 3D printers made possible by passionate open source supporting individuals and groups. Even wordpress, the software that our site is constructed from is an open source project, it is all around you whether you’re aware or not!
The first thing you could do, is donate to the Open Source Initiative.
As a global non-profit, The Open Source Initiative (OSI) protects and promotes open source software, development and communities, championing software freedom in society through education, collaboration, and infrastructure, stewarding the Open Source Definition (OSD), and preventing abuse of the ideals and ethos inherent to the open source movement. See our about and history pages for more.
I donated to them, because the open source community has really played a massive role in making my life as awesome as it is.
If you’re not comfortable donating to the OSI, how about supporting companies that do? Here’s a list of companies and non-profits that have officially joined as affiliates of the Open Source Initiative.
If you don’t want to spend any money at all, no problem! Help us spread the word about Open Source while others are in a spending mood by using #opencybermonday on social!
Thinking about people who support #opensource today, we'll be featuring some and using #OPENCYBERMONDAY . Join us and lets spread the word!
— Make: (@make) November 28, 2016
Today I’ll be spending the day tweeting and re-tweeting about groups that support open source in one way or another.
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