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#ilovefs Report 2014

On February 14th, people all around the world expressed their gratitude and appreciation not only to their partner but also to Free Software and its contributors. With our yearly #ilovefs we asked you to thank your favourite developers and projects and were overwhelmed by the resonance in blogs, social networks, and mailing lists.

Developers and contributors of Free Software projects work hard to ensure our freedom and on this day surely many of them gained new motivation. Thank you for participating in this year's #ilovefs campaign and enjoy some of the many love declarations we collected:

Adrienne sees Free Software as an important part of her life and explains why even little steps in using Free Software are meaningful:

I use it because it is written by people who care deeply about what they do, and who want to keep improving. It reminds me of the Hebrew phrase tikkun olam, which means repairing (or healing) the world. Free Software means you can read the code, which means you can improve it — and then pass it on for the better. Free Software repairs the world by advancing projects made with integrity to people who need them, free of charge. One day, I hope to contribute code to projects that people use every day.

Tamara was an intern in a local hacklab and says that knowing and teaching the ideology and message of Free Software is crucial:

What is really important is that they, while teaching me the purely technical stuff about Linux and helping me with programming, were insisting that I know and get familiar with the ideology and what stands behind Free Software, and why is it crucial to us. They gave me documentaries to watch, they talked, shared, repeated. And I thank them. I am a better person and hacker and have made friends for life.

For Anna, Free Software is especially interesting when mixed with other aspects of an open society :

Today, February the 14th, is an international celebration of our love... for Free Software! People love it for all sorts of reasons, but for me, it's about the creative freedom that Free Software brings, with new software and new skills just a sudo yum install away. I feel especially blessed when Free Software meets Open Culture; then the party really gets started!

#ilovefs is crossing borders

One speciality of #ilovefs is the broadband of people expressing their love for Free Software. Year after year we recognise that Free Software is not only a topic for programmers and professional users but for many groups of people: the average computer users, artists, journalists, companies, and among them also politicians. This year the parliamentary group of the Green party in Germany wrote how important Free Software is in times of global surveillance and in general. And as a small extra they also sent a picture expressing their appreciation for the Free Software community, among them Katrin Göring-Eckardt, Toni Hofreiter, Britta Haßelmann, Claudia Roth, Jan Phillip Albrecht, Hans-Christian Stöbele, and Konstantin von Notz.

There were also several events which focussed on "I Love Free Software Day". In Manchester, Free Software was even celebrated with a week-long festival full of workshops about Bitcoin, encryption, Wordpress and Free Your Android. Anna and the other volunteers had a very busy week with co-organising it but it was worth it: More than 100 people were learning, teaching and having fun with Free Software!

Media coverage

The "I love Free Software Day" was also topic in several online news. For example, the campaign was promoted in Linux-Journalist, Unwatched, Linux-Community, heise.de, Linux-Magazin, ICT News, Dropnodes Magazin, and Netzpolitik.

More blog posts

Beside the high participation in microblogs we also noticed a lot of blog posts this year. Below you can find a selection of articles you should have a look at:

Many authors dedicated their post to particular projects or developers, for example:

• Andreas Färber from SUSE thanked the QEMU developers,
• Anatolij Zelenin wrote a small library for Android containing some information about #ilovefs,
• Isabel says thank you to the contributors to Apache, Debian, Eclipse, Elasticsearch, Linux, ZeroMQ, any all other useful Free Software projects,
• Max Mehl presented ZNC, an IRC bouncer with lots of functionalities,
• Erik Albers thanked the developers of OsmAnd for making the planning of his bicycle tours so much easier,
• Karsten Gerloff said thank you to wget, a small, fast and efficient tool for downloading used also by whistleblowers.
• Guido Arnold appreciates org-mode for making his planning process much more easier, whereas
• Jens Lechtenbörger lists a lot of usefull Free Software apps for his new Fairphone which respect his privacy and
• Tobias Platen also appreciates the release of the Fairphone kernel under GPL although there are a lot of other things to improve.
• Matthias Kirschner dedicated his post to the developers to his favourite music player programs,
• fedoraFTW highlights the importance of freedom for all people working on the fedora OS,
• Hugo Roy explains why he probably will never use another email client than mutt,
• Konstantin and Paul from Fairnopoly present Blender, zsh, vim, and Tmux as essential parts of their work,
• Martin Ingenhoven thanks among others Gnome, ufraw, pinta, digikam, XFCE, and GIMP for their work.
• Mirco Lang shows his readers why simple text adventures like "robot finds kitten" are great and
• Sven Lamprecht dedicates his #ilovefs post to darktable, kdenlive, and ArchLinux.

There were also a lot of articles about Free Software and its advantages in general, for example from:

• Kevin Keijzer who helps other people by building computers from old hardware which only runs with Free Software or from
• Siegrid who appreciates especially the independence gained by the usage of Free Software.
• Christoph Langner loves the political and democratical aspect of Free Software whereas
• Oskar Welzl used the #ilovefs day for telling interested co-workers about the importance of Free Software. The
• Free Software Foundation offers a long list of software they use on a regular basis for their tasks and
• totschka likes the philosphy of community and freedom.
• Benjamin gains a lot of knowledge and fun by using Free Software and
• Steve Woods would simply be lost without the Free Software he uses every day.

There were also a lot of posts in other languages, for example from Databiblioteket , Emilio Gil , Geekstorming , HUP , Planeta Diego , Victorhck in the free world , Association of Greek Users and Friends of FS / OSS , or Carsten Agger