The 13th of February 2025 Syn2Cat, in collaboration with CLUSIL‘s Open Source Working Group, Code Club and Passbolt, joined many other hackerspaces in celebrating the “I Love Free Software” Day.
The informal meeting, held at the Level2 hackerspace, created an opportunity to meet with people interested in Free and Open Source Software coming from Luxembourg and the Greater Region including also a delegation from OpenSaar.
Many of the participants are working with or even contributing to Free and Open Source Software projects while others discovered and appreciated the importance of FOSS software and the communities that are the supporting pillars of digital innovation.
Paolo Vecchi, Syn2Cat’s president, started the event with a brief introduction to what we were celebrating, the current situation in Luxembourg and some of the future steps necessary to improve the support for FOSS and local communities.
Thibaud Latour, Managing Director of LMDDC, presented the benefits of using Open Source software in the education sector as well as some of the factors that are currently limiting the replacement of a few proprietary applications.
Emanuele Fossati, a Syn2Cat member, talked about the ongoing process of creating a definition for Open Source AI and the challenges that a fully Open Source AI might create. Emanuele has also shown how easy and inexpensive is to run privacy preserving AI models on our own PCs and laptops.
The event continued with a brief presentation by Georges Kesseler about 42 Luxembourg, a school training a new generation of developers, which mostly uses Open Source software to deliver their courses.
We then passed on to the networking part of the event facilitated by some local crémant, pizzas and snacks.
As one “I Love Free Software Day” is not enough we also joined in the celebration with the Nijmegen hackerspace the following day.
