"I Love Free Software Day" 2026: Maintainers matter

In the week around 14 February we celebrated the "I Love Free Software Day 2026: Maintainers matter" ❤️. During our 2026 celebrations we highlighted the work done by software maintainers while also reaching out to everybody contributing to Free Software. We expressed our appreciation, not only in words but through financial support, for their work to software freedom.

In 2026, we marked this special day with 22 events in 12 different European countries. Even more, hundreds of people and many organisations joined us in the Fediverse - with a special "Thank you!" note for Free Software projects, maintainers and contributors. To all who joined us this time: "Thank you" for participating in the "I Love Free Software Day 2026: Maintainers matter" ! ❤️❤️❤️

This year the FSFE and its local groups focused on software maintainers of Free Software projects for the "I Love Free Software Day". Together with our local groups, we wanted to raise awareness of all the people maintaining and ensuring that our Free Software projects are updated and available. Maintaining a Free Software project isn't often highlighted enough! Software maintainers are the ones who implement our contributions, who fix security issues - with limited resources - and who ensure that the projects we depend on are still around.

I Love Free Software Day celebrations 2026: Maintainers matter

Celebration and events

For this year, we had 22 different events in 12 European countries. Among them several new people organised an event in a new location for the "I Love Free Software Day" celebrations. Among those events there were two countries, Croatia and Norway, with the first event for this special day. This year, seven of the 20 events were organised from people who are not part of a local FSFE group or are active volunteers for the FSFE. In regard to the "I Love Free Software Day" events, it was especially inspiring to see how many groups came back again to organise a dedicated event.

To help the FSFE's local groups with organising all the different events we updated the I Love Free Software Day toolkit and a new version of the old paper quiz, now also available as an online quiz. Additionally, to the toolkit and to focus communication with everybody willing to join the "I Love Free Software Day" events we created a dedicated mailing list for the event organisers - if you wish to become an I Love Free Software Day event organiser reach out to contact@fsfe.org.

With this preparation our local groups could get started with organising all the amazing events across Europe ❤️.

Tirana, Albania

Once again LibreLabs, formerly known as OpenLabs, came back together to organise an event in Albania. This year it was a cosy get-together and a great start of 'I Love Free Software Day' celebrations.

I Love Free Software Day reaches Croatia and Norway

For the first time the "I Love Free Software Day" reached Croatia and Norway each with a local event! The initiative was taken up by individual Free Software enthusiasts and in the case of Norway linked to a presentation of the Norwegian translation of the "Ada and Zangemann" book, a story about software, skateboards, and raspberry ice cream.

The event in Croatia was taking place in the coastal city of Pula, and organised in a café. It was small but very nice to exchange views and opinions on Free Software and to talk with one another. For the "I Love Free Software Day" 2026, the event was only announced a few days before taking place and the short notice left little time to prepare. For the upcoming "I Love Free Software Days" we are very curious to see what will be happening over the next years and of course we hope that the "I Love Free Software Day" celebrations will take roots in Croatia.

Also, the event in Norway was the first time a local celebration of the "I Love Free Software Day" took place in the European North. So, "I Love Free Software Day" is coming to the ice parts of Europe. Similar to Croatia, it all came together in the last few days before the 14th of February. The event took place in a café, and it was a nice get-together will Free Software enthusiasts from the area.

Bonn, Germany celebration

Among our newest event locations was also the German city of Bonn. The local FSFE group in Bonn is quite active and holds regular meetings throughout the year. Everybody is welcome to step by at the "bitcircus101". In 2026, for the first time, the local group also came together for the "I Love Free Software Day" and organised a larger event with talks, vegan curry and lots of fun. In their talks they also reflected the topic of this year's "I Love Free Software Day" Maintainers matter. Together they talked about, what a maintainer is, what kind of work she or he does and how best to support maintainers in their work. All in all it was an amazing celebration with a lot of topics to discuss and wonderful discussion about Free Software.

Amsterdam, Netherlands celebration

Together with the Internet Archive Europe, our volunteer Tommi organised an event in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This was also the first time, that a celebration took place in Amsterdam for the "I Love Free Software Day". It was a great day full of Free Software, networking and much more. The day was made especially remarkable by the kindness of the hosts and co-organiser, Beatrice and the team of Internet Archive Europe.

Poland

Last year the "I Love Free Software Day" made it to Poland! This year the city of Poznan had one of the biggest local group celebrations in 2026, with nearly 80 people attending their celebration in the University. It was a day full of talks and presentations of Free Software projects, of fun, and of course writing postcards.

Apart from the celebration in Poznan there were two more "I Love Free Software Day" events taking place in Poland, one in Warsaw and another, for the first time, in Łódź. It was amazing to see, once again, how many people came together for the celebrations and changed their views, thoughts and stories about Free Software and its projects. In Warsaw, around 40 people celebrated their passion for Free Software in the local hacker space.

More events? More fun!

With all the amazing events taking place around Europe over 300 people were reached, and it was again a great pleasure to see all the different communities in the different countries coming together to celebrate all the contributors, maintainers and developers of Free Software!

It was a great pleasure to see the people gathering in Oxford (UK), Potteries (UK), Eindhoven (Netherlands), Zurich (CH), Barcelona and Madrid in Spain, and the German local groups in Frankfurt, Berlin and Nuremberg. Have a look at the picture galleries from the events below!

Outreach of the "I Love Free Software Day" 2026

Once more the #ilovefs made it under the top most used hashtags in the Fediverse on the 14th of February! Proofing that the "I Love Free Software Day" celebrations are taking roots not only in the real world but continuously growing also in the online sphere. For this, we want to say a very loud and proud 'Thank you'! Thank you to all of you who shared their appreciation for Free Software and their gratitude to all free software contributors.

The "I Love Free Software" 2026 made headlines in the fediverse but for the first time it was also on the Hacker News with a 'thank you' blog post by the FSFE's president Matthias Kirschner. In his post Matthias shared his passion for Arch and especially the wonderful and very extensive ArchWiki. The ArchWiki is not just full of knowledge related to Arch Linux, but also with general information about Free Software projects and Linux related questions.

Volunteers coming forward for the "I Love Free Software Day!"

Not only achieved this year's "I Love Free Software Day" some new highs in regard to outreach, we also had a novelty with the new Fediverse Badges. One of the Polish volunteers, set up its own BadgeFed instance and shared the "I Love Free Software Day" event organisers badge, participant badge and contributor badge for the "I Love Free Software Day". Thus creating a new way of highlighting the work done by contributors and saying 'Thank you' to all those amazing people who made the "I Love Free Software Day 2026: Maintainers Matter" such a special and unique time of the year!

Not only volunteers from the FSFE came forward this year with new ideas. Also, the long-standing wish for a map for all the different "I Love Free Software Day" events has been made possible with Tom, the person behind, the mapforge project! Mapforge allows you to create individualised maps of events, hikes, or places you want to share. This year we had our own "I Love Free Software Day" map.

Software Freedom Podcast episode with Lorenz Kästle

As it is a tradition now, for the 2026 Maintainers matter celebrations the FSFE recorded a special Software Freedom Podcast episode. For our 47th episode Bonnie Mehring sat down with one of the maintainers from the well-used monitoring plugins, Lorenz Kästle. Bonnie and Lorenz discuss what nice benefits but also challenges come along with being a maintainer in your free time.

The podcast is still available, and we warmly invite you to take “I Love Free Software Day” to your ears and give it a listen: SFP#47: ILoveFS: Let’s meet our maintainers

For the "I Love Free Software Day" 2026 we also came up with a new way to convey why this celebration and the general message behind the "I Love Free Software Day" is so important, a comic! And let's be honest, who does not love comics *-*

Have a look and get inspired ❤️ ❤️ ❤️

Thank you for joining this year's “I Love Free Software” celebrations ❤️ ❤️ ❤️