Please consider adding [email protected] to your address book, which
will ensure that our messages reach you and not your spam box!
Dear Free Software Supporter,
We need your help. Like many organizations right now, the Free
Software Foundation (FSF) has suffered and we have reported financial
losses for a number of years. We have had to make salary adjustments
to match inflation and rising health expenses so that we can retain
our small but extremely talented and committed group of staff.
Operational costs have also risen, like the legal fees for the
work we do in compliance, which have gone up several times. These
expenses have made it almost impossible to do the kind of enforcement
that truly challenges violators. Revenue has not kept up, because
people all over the world are going through the same challenges as we
are. The imbalance has cost us staff members already, and it continues
to force us into making difficult decisions about, for example, our
much loved office space.
We know not everyone is in a position to, but if you can, can you
support our efforts by joining the FSF as an associate member?
An associate membership is a great show of support we can rely on.
With your help, we can respond to current events with legal counsel,
we can hold companies to account and make sure they recognize the
freedoms granted to the user by the GPL licenses. With your help, we
can play an important role in shaping legislation for future
technologies such as AI and provide recommendations to governments on
public infrastructure. With your help, we can provide infrastructure,
campaigning, and financial support for free software projects such
as the GNU System. With your help, we can increase our focus and
rebuild our strength. By supporting us today, you help secure our
future. Every membership this spring will help us towards our
goal of 200 new members by July 19, and you will receive an FSF
thermal mug as a welcome gift. Associate members will also be able to
enjoy all the member benefits.
I speak about what it means to be up against billions of proprietary
software dollars in the article I wrote for this season's Free
Software Bulletin. It aims to illustrate the size of the challenge
ahead of us, even when we are not suffering financial hardships. The
FSF has an important role to play for computer users globally for
years to come, and we still have a lot of work to do. Here are some
accomplishments from these last few months alone:
FSF was selected to participate in the National Institute of
Standards and Technology (NIST) Consortium on Artificial
Intelligence Safety. The work will provide recommendations to the
government following President Biden's executive order on "the safe,
secure, and trustworthy development and use of artificial
intelligence." Our campaigns team is making sure that the free
software perspective is represented in discussions about the ethical
use of (so-called) AI.
We contributed to the current UK cloud services market investigation
by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) on the supply of public
"cloud" infrastructure services in the UK.
We took on a new fiscally sponsored project: EmacsConf
is a great collective that has been successfully hosting the EmacsConf
conference for several years now, and which has taken a step forward
by opening themselves up to donations.
The FSF licensing team has celebrated several successes with its
licensing stewardship. The GNU licenses can sometimes be used in
such a way that they, intentionally or not, confuse users. Such
confusion can make it feel unsafe to use the license, which is bad for
user freedom, and for the license itself. Using the GNU GPL is
supposed to send a strong message that the purpose of the license is
to grant users their four essential software freedoms -- and we need
to protect that message.
We dealt with two subpoenas in these last months. One of which was a
subpoena by Vizio, which required a deposition in the SFC v
Vizio case. I personally spent many hours preparing for this
deposition with legal counsel so that I could confidently defend the
FSF's intention for the GNU licenses to promote the freedom to run,
copy, distribute, study, change, and improve software — which requires
that source code be shared with users. Preparation was vital because
Vizio challenged our responses the full 10(!) hours this deposition
lasted. The deposition was held May 1st, 2024, and is due to be used
when the case goes to court in July of this year, where we might still
be asked to testify.
There is much more work to do, and much more we want to take on. The
challenge we face is also our greatest opportunity and strength. We
are not, and will never be, beholden to corporate and outside
interests. Instead, we rely and thrive on the thousands of individual
free software supporters and champions around the world.
We currently have fantastic people in place in our licensing,
campaigns, tech, and operations teams, who will make your contribution
worthwhile. We continue to make a difference every day towards
preventing a future where proprietary software companies have taken
full control. We rely on your help to achieve this.
