“Romeo, oh, Romeo!” exclaims the 3D-printed robot Julliet to her 3D-printed Romeo.

It is that time of the year again – the day we display our affection to our significant other …and the Free Software we like best.

Usually I sing praise to the underdogs that I use, the projects rarely anyone knows about, small odd things that make my everyday life nicer.

This year though I will point out some communities, that I am (more or less) active in, that impressed me the most in the past year.

  • KDE – this desktop needs no introduction and neither should its community. But ever so often we have to praise things that we take for granted. KDE is one of the largest and nicest FS communities I have ever come across. After meeting a few known faces and some new ones at FOSDEM, I am very much looking forward to going to Akademy again this year!
  • Mageia – as far as GNU/Linux distros go, many would benefit by taking Mageia as a good example on how to include your community and how to develop your infrastructure to be inclusive towards newcommers.
  • Mer, Nemo Mobile – note: Jolla is a company (and commercial product with some proprietary bits), most of its Sailfish OS’s infrastructure is FS and Jolla tries very hard to co-operate with its community and as a rule develops in upstream. This is also the reason why the communities of the mentioned projects are very intertwined. The co-operation in this wider community is very active and while not there yet, Mer and Nemo Mobile (with Glacier UI coming soon) are making me very optimistic that a modern Free Software mobile OS is just around the corner.
  • Last, but not least, I must mention three1 communities that are not FS projects by themselves, but where instrumental to educating me (and many others) about FS and digital freedoms in general – Thank you, LUGOS for introducing me to FS way back in the ’90s and all the help in those early days! Thank you, Cyberpipe for all the things I learnt in your hackerspace! And thank you, FSFE for being the beacon of light for Free Software throughout Europe (and beyond)!

hook out → closing my laptop and running back to my lovely Andreja, whom I thank for bearing with me


  1. Historically Cyberpipe was founded as part of Zavod K6/4, but in 2013 Cyberpipe merged with one of its founders – LUGOS, thus merging the two already before intertwined communities for good. 


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