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Dear Free Software Supporter,
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has an incredibly strong and loyal
supporting community. Every day, we try and honor that by working hard
to protect the freedom to run, copy, change, and share our
software. Individuals just like you, who give what they can, make up
99% of our funding, and we manage these resources responsibly to
ensure we remain true to ourselves.
The pandemic, inflation, and global economic instability have put a
strain on the FSF's reserves, and that's forcing us to make
adjustments to our budget. We need your help now to ensure our
continuation as the last bastion of software freedom.
In these past years, we spent a lot of time and effort on making our
board governance process more transparent and participatory. The
FSF board will be ready to anticipate and guide the FSF through
upcoming challenges, like the growing list of injustices standing in
the way of software freedom. It is important to do this internal work
now, but rest assured, your support actually goes directly toward our
mission. For the third time, we achieved the combination of a Charity
Navigator four-star rating and 100% score. Despite a challenging
external environment and the work that goes into the board's internal
process, we have achieved a lot over the past year:
Our campaigns team has taken on Google and the gross injustice
that is their ironically named Web Environment Integrity (WEI). Just
a few weeks after our article made headlines in the tech press, Google
dialed back its plan considerably. And, as always, we have focused on
the importance of bringing people in by showing them what it is we are
talking about. Most people these days do all their computing through
opaque user interfaces or mobile phones. To this end, we hosted seven
free software workshops, all shareable through MediaGoblin,
and the FSF's Peertube instance. And we celebrated forty years of
GNU with an incredibly fun interactive program showing the practical
ins and outs of software freedom to kids and adults alike;
Our tech team has made major progress on our Free JavaScript
campaign with updates to not one, but two, FSF JavaScript extensions:
LibreJS and JShelter, and they are currently migrating our
monitoring system from Nagios to Prometheus to increase the overall
quality of the infrastructure that supports the GNU Project, as
well as other community projects, like Trisquel; and,
With our licensing team, we've resolved a serious DMCA takedown
request threatening some of the major GNU packages. We have more than
doubled the amount of copyright assignments we have taken on
this year, strengthening our overall position defending these GNU
packages. We added another licensing volunteer to our committed
compliance team to help field all the questions that come in,
and are making some serious progress in our Respects Your
Freedom (RYF) and compliance queues. And, because we recently
filled the position of licensing and compliance manager, we're
expecting major updates on this front in the upcoming year.
By supporting us today, you help secure a free future. If every
reader of this letter supports our efforts by ensuring a
contribution, we can increase our strength and direct our
resources towards doing even more. Or, you can advocate for user
freedom by convincing just one person to join the FSF. Your
contribution will count towards achieving our fall goal of
$375,000 before December 31.
In this fall's Bulletin, I speak about how we continue to stand firm
for software freedom, which sometimes means we do not always benefit
from the successes for which we have paved the way. We see compromises
far too often for the sake of convenience, or worse, popularity. The
FSF is proud of its position as the last line of defense for free
software as an ethical imperative over profit-centric ideology. And
the FSF is only eleven people securing this position against trillions
of dollars. Your support will make a difference.
