FSFE Potteries / Meeting on 12/2/2025: I Love Free Software Day 2025
This page has some brief notes and imagery surrounding a past meeting, you likely got here by clicking a link shown on a past calendar event.
Once again this was a great night following on from previous years! This year the ILoveFS team at FSFE provided a short presentation to go over the purpose of this annual tradition, as well as some games to play.
We chose to run the event 3 days prior to the 14th February, on the 11th, so that it lines up with when we normally do socials. This flexibility continues to be of great help for those people who which to be elsewhere for the actual Valentines Day!
This event was celebrated in many other countries across Europe and is supported by FSFE. The point being to give thanks for the free software that we use every day, and generally socialise over our common love for it all! The theme for this year was 'Hidden Project' where we remember some of the less obvious projects, such as smaller utilities and libraries, for how they make much larger things possible. Plenty of this kind of useful software was talked about from the more obvious like curl (and educating people who think they've used curl on PowerShell, when it's actually just an alias to the inferior Invoke-WebRequest cmdlet!) to the more developer stuff like Xdebug for PHP.
Just like last year, the KPA Clubhouse served as a brilliant venue and we booked the upstairs room. There were slightly less tables than last year, but more than enough for the laptops we'd brought along to run free software and operating systems such as Trisquel GNU/Linux!. The older 802.11n external USB wifi adapters we got last year, were once again handy for getting us online via the Keele Visitor Wi-Fi network and avoid those nasty non-free firmware blobs! The three laptops were also loaded with plenty of free software games such as SuperTuxKart, Minetest, SuperTux, Extreme Tux Racer, OpenTTD, Frozen Bubble, 2048, Robots, XBill, SGT Puzzles, OpenArena, Freeciv, Freedoom, and BZFlag, as well as the usual assortment of applications.
Plenty of FSFE and ILoveFS merchandise was distributed including leaflets, stickers, and postcards sent by FSFE. Unfortunately we thought we'd forgotten the postcards so they weren't put out for people to take, until the very end when we realised we hadn't forgot them. However when going over the presentation the Sharepic site was mentioned, and a few people gave their thanks using that website and the laptops provided instead.
The semi circle of comfortable chairs was a great asset when we did the I Love Free Software quiz! We had 4 teams in the end... and the winning team got 26 points and all the members of that team won Tux plushies! The Free Software inspired game of taboo was also very enjoyable. Quite a bit of conversation went into open hardware too, helped on by Joe being in attendance from Devtank. Additionally, if you're confused by the cat in the photos below... we have no idea whose cat it was either... he just jumped up on the quiz master mid-game and then started to snuggle in various peoples laps to go asleep!
A really big thank you to FSFE for funding the food and soft drinks for the evening! This was especially helpful as the card machine at the venue wasn't working, so to pick up the tab at the end for everyone was a great help!
As this was mostly a social... we don't normally do any meeting notes for it... but since we took photos... it's best they go here!
Note: Not everyone wanted to be in photos, so there are only a few people shown.
