We ♥ Free Software!

On this Love Free Software Day, we want to express our gratitude to the maintainers of the free and open-source tools we teach with and about, research with, and rely on every day.

Thank you for building and sustaining:
🔹 OpenAlex – An open catalog of the global research ecosystem, connecting publications, authors, and institutions.
🔹 R – A powerful open-source language for statistical computing and data visualization.
🔹 Quarto – A modern publishing system for reproducible reports, documents, and websites.
🔹 Git – The backbone of version control and collaborative workflows.
🔹 Renv – Enabling reproducible R project environments.
🔹 Zotero – Making reference management and citation effortless.
🔹 RDMO – Supporting structured and sustainable research data management.

And the tools that help us run research, organize events, and understand our impact:
🔹 formR – For designing and managing online studies.
🔹 Pretix – For seamless event registration and ticketing.
🔹 Matomo – For privacy-respecting analytics.

Free software is not just infrastructure, it is a collective achievement built on openness, transparency, and shared knowledge.

To everyone who maintains, documents, debugs, and improves these projects: Thank you. Your work matters so much to us.

For researchers wanting to use these tools in their workflow, find all our self-paced tutorials here: https://github.com/lmu-osc?view_as=public

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