Hello, I'm from Germany. From Meerbusch in Northrhine-Westphalia. German states are not so independent like those of the U.S., but more than these of France. I'll be happy if you are interessed in our state. I love open-source applications and I use Firefox, OpenOffice.org, Thunderbird, FileZilla, KeePass, Notepad++, Inkscape, Winpooch...and I don't even know which was a freeware and which open-source. In fact, I'm happy with any free and useful applications. The difference between freeware and open-source is that the programmer of a freeware has to work a lot to keep the application up-to-date, because nobody helps him/her.
Additionally to the babels, I strongly believe that these issues are important: