Marga's blog http://www.marga.com.ar/blog/index.cgi Free as in Freedom en Debian Appreciation Day Recap http://www.marga.com.ar/blog/index.cgi/debian/Debian_Appreciation_Day_Recap.html It's been a couple of very interesting days. The thank.debian.net site was quite a success, and a lot of credit is due to Valessio's awesome balloons. Even though I didn't do much marketing about it, the site was linked on Slashdot, LWN, Ubuntu's and Debian's website, Planet, the BTS, and quite a number of blogs.

We received almost 3000 thank you messages, from all over the world. Even though the site was in English, many people felt inspired to leave their thank you messages in their languages, if you browse over the site, you'll find messages in Turkish, Chinese, Russian and many other languages. On that matter, I was particularly amazed at this message in persian, which displays properly even inside mutt.

Not too surprising, one of the things that people most value of Debian is the package management. The apt team got a lot of thank you messages, and many of the ones directed to the whole community also mention apt and upgrades as something very valuable

I find it very interesting that many of the messages, came from Ubuntu users, stating that even though they use Ubuntu, they really value the work done by Debian. A number of posts also mention sidux, knoppix and mint among the many derivatives. Many people stated the many years that they use Debian, some of them have just started, some have been using Debian for quite a while.
I was happily surprised by a number of posts that included a thank you message to "guys/gals" or "guys and girls". And the image used in the "hackergotchi" of this message really brightened my day.

Finally, I'm sorry that some people were annoyed by the thank you messages. For next year, we can try to do something a bit different and hopefully not annoy those who were annoyed this time. I do think that once in a while it's nice to be able to receive some of that much love that the users have for Debian and we rarely get to know about.

]]> Debian Appreciation Day http://www.marga.com.ar/blog/index.cgi/debian/Appreciation_Day.html Today is Debian's Birthday, and for a while I've wanted to do something special on this date. In order to raise the general motivation of the project, have a special day when everyone is invited to thank those that make our lives easier.

However long I have wanted to do this, I haven't had that much time to prepare the site itself. I've spent the past two days getting it working, with the help of Maxy, Valessio and Raphael, but there's still a lot more work to do.

In any case, it's already usable at: thank.debian.net. I invite you to use it to send thanks to those that work on Debian.

The code is temporarily hosted at code.google.com, but I plan to move it to alioth as soon as I'm not so rushed to finish it. Bugs & Patches much appreciated!

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