"I Love Free Software Day" 2024: Forging the future with Free Software
Together with hundreds of people and several organisations, we have celebrated another "I Love Free Software Day" on 14 February! On this day, we reached out to Free Software contributors to say Thank you! To all who joined us this time: Thank you for participating in this 14th edition of the "I Love Free Software Day" ❤️❤️❤️!
The "I Love Free Software Day" 2024 focused on younger generations and how to introduce them into the Free Software community. Therefore, several of our local groups celebrated this day with a meeting focused on younger people. The rest just focused on the main "I Love Free Software Day" idea: to acknowledge the amazing Free Software community, thanking Free Software projects and sharing their love for Free Software. And while several FSFE local groups - in Italy, Denmark, Netherlands, Spain, England, Germany, and Switzerland - got together and celebrated their love for software freedom in person, we were happy to see how other other members of the Free Software community joined our call and organised meetings, like the one in Portugal.
I Love Free Software Day celebrations 2024
For this year the FSFE planned a special gift for several organisations and long-term volunteers to get them ready for 'I Love Free Software' day. We gave them an acrylglas heart and an LED strip, plus a microcontroller and some jump wires. The challenge? To tinker around with these things and to upload a picture of the heart on 14 February. It turned out to be quite a challenge, but a lot of fun!
For the celebrations in 2024, over a hundred people came together in 13 local meetings organised by either FSFE local groups or other Free Software groups in seven different countries. The celebrations were as different as the groups. The local group in Aarhus, Denmark, organised a reading of the children's book "Ada & Zangemann", while the Portuguese organisation esop organised a translation of this book into Portuguese.
There are many more thank you messages and blogposts out there highlighting the work of Free Software contributors. It is touching to see so many people, companies, and organisations joining us for this special day and reaching out to the people who work for software freedom. For a longer read we recommend the full "I Love Free Software Day: Forging the future" report.
Thank you for joining this year's “I Love Free Software” celebrations ❤️ ❤️ ❤️