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Dear Free Software Supporter,

This first message ringing in our year-end fundraiser comes to you from a newly remote organization! Just a few months ago, we closed the doors of 51 Franklin St. for good. The move was an immense endeavor, not without its moments of sadness, but also a major step forward for the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Being remote limits regular expenses, allows staff to live where rent rates are more affordable, and above all, it forces us to organize ourselves beyond Boston and expand our horizons.

Remote working is just one of the major efforts to make the FSF a more contemporary and resilient organization. It has been a busy year in that respect, because we also welcomed three new board members in June, and we are currently in the process of reviewing the sitting board members with the FSF's associate members. All this work is helping to strengthen the FSF for years to come.

Despite hardship and losses for the organization, our extremely talented and dedicated group of now eleven people (this was fourteen just a few years ago!) is continuing their tireless work to help the FSF progress, both internally and externally, and advance our mission. Some highlights from this year include:

• Our two-person sysadmin team moved our entire setup without any downtime. We now run all of our infrastructure between two server locations and one storage space. They did this all while administering a fully free LibrePlanet, maintaining fully free infrastructure for the GNU Project and other community projects, and managing vital security upgrades. They have also been extremely busy fighting credit card fraud and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks for which tens of thousands of addresses were blocked -- all while keeping downtime to a minimum for all services we manage;

• Our licensing and compliance team is diligently and successfully completing stewardship cases of confusing licensing, as well as outright violations. We also continue to protect the original intentions of the GNU General Public License by lending our voice to two definitive court cases.

• On top of our ongoing work for the generative AI task force of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)'s AI Safety Institute Consortium, we established a working group that is currently drafting a statement of criteria for free machine learning (ML) applications.
  
  The work is vital: machine learning developments, much like software, need a firm definition for user freedom in order to protect us from abuses which tend to be cloaked by the word "progress." After the recent release of the Open Source Initiative's (OSI) problematic Open Source AI Definition (OSAID), now, more than ever, it is up to the FSF to guard the definition in this space. These criteria cannot be driven by outside interests, nor may they be watered down to promote political or commercial adoption.
  
  We have issued a preliminary statement on our position that given our current understanding of machine learning applications, we believe that we cannot say a machine learning application is free unless all its training data and the related scripts for processing it respect all users, following the four freedoms.

As our shift to a remote organization proves, we reduce expenses where we can, and handle your contribution with care. We do whatever is necessary to forge a path to user freedom. But advocating for user freedom in a fully free organization comes with financial restraints: legal fees in the US are prohibitive, and on top of our compliance work, depositions or handling a subpoena also come with substantial invoices. For example, even when we successfully fend off abuses aimed at our infrastructure, being under attack not only means spending valuable time, but also has serious financial consequences in the form of credit card fees for failed transactions!

We know not everyone is in a position to, but if you can, can you support our efforts by making a donation? Or, an associate membership is a great show of support we can rely on, and an annual FSF associate membership translates to a mere $2.69 per week, or $0.38 per day! We need more resources to retain our current staff and continue our work, but my request is even bigger, because we have to do more. By supporting us today, you help secure our future. Associate members will also be able to enjoy all the associate member benefits. Will you help us reach our year-end fundraising goal of USD$ 400,000 this year-end? If you join as a member this period, we'll send you a set of five unique postcards to help you promote computer user freedom.

In addition to the challenge of continuously rising expenses in this difficult economy, we are also confronted with the threat of ever-growing power of corporations eager to benefit from our position and mission being undermined. For forty years, any position on what constitutes a just digital landscape has been measured against the FSF’s firm stance on user freedom. We have put everything we have into steadfastly preserving this point from which user freedom can be measured, and we will not falter.

We stand firm in our commitment to our mission and values, refusing to be beholden to outside interests. Instead, we thrive relying on the thousands of individual free software supporters around the world like you. Together, we stand strong against these challenges and continue to make meaningful impact. With your help, we rise up against proprietary injustices, hold the line, and continue to make great strides towards user freedom for all.

Yours in freedom,

Zoë Kooyman
Executive Director

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