Tonight I'll be celebrating #ilovefs with the Portuguese community (and you can too!), but until then...

❤️ @mediawiki@wikis.world 💙 @openstreetmap@en.osm.town

These two are free software apps that, during this year, I felt thankful for existing, so today I want to send an heartfelt thanks to their maintainers!

💜 @microg@fosstodon.org 💖 @fdroidorg@floss.social

But if we're focusing on maintainers, then I must send special hearts to the maintainers these two, who have had tough challenges during this year (and need our support and strength for 2026).

💗 #PublicMoneyPublicCode

I suppose the PMPC campaign started and is maintained by @fsfe@mastodon.social (thanks!) but one of the beauties of it is how it has grown, and it is nowadays part of the public discourse. We see political parties refer to the term. We see position papers and even law proposals referring to it. We see open consultation submissions by non-tech entities mentioning it. More than a campaign, it is now a concept, a movement, an ideal. So thanks to all of you that keep saying: "Public Money? Public Code!"

💘 And of course, my love to all the free software I kept using in my daily life, things would be difficult without it (and their maintainers): ssh, telnet, vim, gvim, botany, git, konsole, @firefox@lemmy.world, @ubuntu@ubuntu.social, @libreoffice@fosstodon.org, #mastodon, @element@mastodon.matrix.org and many, many more!

💕 💞 🥰😍😘💌💝💓💟❤️‍🔥🩷🧡💛💚

Today @BeLibre@mastodon-belgium.be published an article, "Beyond the Marketing: Measuring Microsoft’s Cloud Sovereignty in Europe".

In it, they publish a study where they measure how does Microsoft Cloud Stack measire in the European Commission’s Cloud Sovereignty Framework, since "people at Microsoft were asked, but did not answer how its services perform against this framework, while an estimated 90–95% of Belgian government services currently depend on Microsoft infrastructure."

The dependency is not a Belgium exclusive, and this study is relevant for all other EU countries (and beyond, I dare say).

To summarized conclusion is only clear in the actual document, where it claims:

BeLibre recommends organisations to implement stratified procurement: If needed, Microsoft services can be used for lower-classification workloads; European providers or self-hosted open-source for higher-classification workloads requiring SEAL-3+ across all objectives.

(SEAL-3+ is everything classified secret or top-secret)

https://belibre.be/en/sovereignty/mso-seal-assessment/

I've criticized France's plan to keep kids away from social media, @eff@mastodon.social now has a very interesting article about the plans to do the same in USA:

Congress Wants To Hand Your Parenting to Big Tech

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/congress-wants-hand-your-parenting-big-tech

• @kirschner@mastodon.social 's "Ada & Zangemann: A Tale of Software, Skateboards, and Raspberry Ice Cream" was a wonderful surprise -- I knew I'd like this book since I've heard he had written it, but I'll admit I only actually read it once I had the actual physical book in my hands... and ended up being surprised by it a couple of times, the book has plenty more depth than I assumed! Sure, it is what I thought it would be, "a book for children about free software", but it is so much more than that...

• @o_sarilho@mastodon.art is a webcomic - and fortunately it is also collected in physical format. There are versions in Portuguese and English, but this is a SciFi comic book from a Portuguese author, and that alone would get my attention... the fact that part of the action happens on the region where I actually live just made it even more interesting! So, well, I knew I would need to read it, and I bought the books, but only in 2025 did I actually started reading it... and, well - all I can say is that I glad I have the rest of the series so far, so I can catch up!