"I Love Free Software Day": Free Software games and a SharePic generator
Since 2010 the Free Software Foundation Europe has been organising the yearly "I Love Free Software Day". Together with hundreds of Free Software enthusiasts we celebrated our love for Free Software on the 14th of February. To all of you who took part and celebrated the "I Love Free Software Day", we would like to thank you so much.
In 2022 we have worked very hard on creating something new and fun for this year's "I Love Free Software Day". So we have set a topic for the day and focused on Free Software games. Besides the special podcast episode about the Free Software game "0 A.D.: Empires Ascendant" with its project leader, Stanislas Dolcini, we have organised an event dedicated to Free Software games.
The "I Love Free Software Day: gaming event"
For our two hour event the Free Software Foundation Europe has hosted four speakers, who took us into the world of Free Software games. Afterwards we started to play the Free Software game Veloren. Our first talk was from Justin Jacobs , the engine developer and campaign designer of the game Flare. Our next speaker was Kati Baker,, with who we discovered the organisation of Godot Wild Jams, and with Joel Uckelman we learned about the development of the game engine Vassal. Last but not least Forest Anderson introduced us to the game Veloren. Roughly 60 people joined the event; around half of them joined us in our own BigBlueButton instance and the other half in the stream we provided. For the technical set up of our stream and BigBlueButton instance we had great support by our system hacker Alvar Penning and our System Hackers coordinator Max Mehl.
We enjoyed the gaming event a lot and would like to say thank you to all of you who participated and supported the event. The recordings of the event are available on our Peertube instance or on our YouTube channel.
Show your love for Free Software
For this year's "I Love Free Software Day" we have also introduced some more creative ways to express your gratitude to Free Software contributors. Therefore the FSFE has released a series of new videos for this special day. In the videos staffers and volunteers alike say their thanks to different Free Software projects. Among others, Lina Ceballos has thanked the Free Software projects "AntennaPod" and "funkwhale" for their great work, and FSFE's Financial Officer, Patrick Ohnewein, has expressed his gratitude to all of those who contribute to Free Software. For more inspirational videos and quotes have a look at our updated "Why they love Free Software" page.
Finally yet importantly, the FSFE together with the system hacker Alvar Penning has created our very own SharePic generator. With this tool everyone can easily make their own SharePic and share it via the various social media channels. Let your creativity run free and show your support for software freedom. This would not have been possible without the work on the SharePic design by our volunteer Florian Snow and our former intern Marlene Kietreiber.
Celebrating our love for software freedom
As in previous years, #ilovefs has been the number one in the Fediverse network, with over 47 thousand mentions and over 20 thousand users talking about their love for Free Software.
People and organisations have also celebrated their love for Free Software outside the various social media channels. As can bee seen by O’Reilly, the publisher of Matthias Kirschner's children's book "Ada & Zangemann", who have also participated and shared their love for software freedom.
Another creative way to express their thanks and love for Free Software has been used by the German association Digitalcourage. They have written a whole bunch of love letters to different Free Software projects.
Those are just some of the people who have shown their love for Free Software on the “I Love Free Software Day”. Many more have participated by sharing their love and gratitude via different social media channels.
In case you missed your opportunity to thank your favourite project, mark February 14 as "I Love Free Software Day" in your calendar for next year. But remember, you can always and without any special occasion express your gratitude and appreciation throughout the entire year. You do not need a special day, as there is simply no wrong time for that!
We would like to thank everyone involved in and contributing to this day, as well as the countless developers, translators, community managers, artists and anyone else involved in Free Software.