It is already known that in recent years technology has advanced by leaps and bounds where the global interconnection to the internet by millions of people has allowed people to interact with anyone from another place anywhere on the planet.
The onset of the pandemic in 2020, forced most large and small companies to change their traditional way of working, and implement or create new technologies to be able to continue operating with their employees even remotely where they can work from home, and so on. avoid contagion by covid-19.
No free software project in the world escaped from this, each of the free software projects in general being affected for different reasons, but in what way can it be said that they were affected? Next we will deal with the subject in detail …
Due to the covid-19 pandemic in all countries of the world there was an almost total economic stoppage affecting different areas to a greater or lesser extent.
In the case of free software, it can be said that it was positively affected in the case of the time that many collaborators and programmers can now dedicate to projects because they had more time to give a greater impulse to the development process and improvements of the different software solutions in the world of free software.
But, on the economic issue, the story changed a lot since many companies that due to donations and support that provide economic for operating expenses of these projects cannot afford to continue financing them due to the paralysis of their own operations, leaving some projects of free software in abandonment or being forced to look for other sources of financing.
Although other companies in the technology area began to have a greater boom and consequently a greater amount of income from the economic area in which they operate, it does not always mean that they will invest more money for financing or donations in free software projects.
This generated different situations in different projects and organizations in the world of free software, including rethinking other forms of financing.
It is a bit strange now to have more volunteer availability but in some cases lower income from donations and financing, but this was the situation generated in 2020 due to the global pandemic that occurred.
But even so, the majority of free software projects managed to survive and thanks to the new organization available to the companies where developers work, they implemented a remote work methodology, the time for traveling to their work areas is saved, and now they can work from home with more time and performance and in their free time (now with longer periods of time due to free time) work for free software projects, thus generating activity and development evolution in shorter periods of time.
Although this does not mean, as in the case of large free software projects, that their activity in their development will increase significantly, these projects must also overcome the problems generated by lack of financing, often achieving miraculous financing that saves the project from being inoperative. oblivion.
Despite all the adversities generated by the pandemic crisis, many non-profit organizations supported by free software are creating and testing free software tools to analyze the impact of the pandemic and how to implement effective bio-security measures to prevent it from the situation is seriously exacerbated, and having all the necessary information at hand for future pandemics of other diseases that may be generated.
Some of the efforts by the open source communities can be read in the article below:
https://openexpoeurope.com/es/iniciativas-open-source-contra-el-covid-19/
Where free software and hardware communities are generating different solutions to combat the impact of the pandemic, thanks to the joint support of these worldly communities and organizations with the greatest impact on the entire planet.
More Free Software and Free Hardware Users
During the pandemic, the market share of GNU / Linux managed to grow up to 3.6%, making it known that this free operating system has progressively taken more market share every day, although in 2021 it had a fall in 2021 it is observed that every day progressively more users begin to use GNU / Linux in one of its different distributions.
This increase in GNU / Linux users is observed to be unleashed in the period of time where the crisis due to covid-19 worsened, we can verify this through the following link:
A world of opportunities that free software offers everyone
The effort to program or develop free software solutions is to defend users and the basic freedoms they have over being able to copy, analyze, modify and redistribute the modified version or original version of the software to others, but always respecting these basic freedoms allowing Thus, the general public has access to it, without having to pay for restrictive software licenses for proprietary software and that only a group of users with economic capacity have access to these software solutions, and leaving the vast majority excluded access to software tools that can be of great use to you.
It should be noted that a software created with a single copy and paste you can make hundreds of copies of it that you can share with other people, proprietary software for doing this is considered a crime an act of piracy, this means that the person itself You cannot share a copy of proprietary software with your family members, and for this reason Richard Stallman created the Free Software Foundation and all the basic infrastructure that all free software communities use to be able to work in a world where the only restriction is that the software developed is always free and open from its first version.
