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Dear Free Software Supporter,

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) will reach its fortieth anniversary on October 4, 2025, in just a few months. Can you believe it? Individuals like you have kept this movement going for forty years. Thanks to the hard work of free software advocates, a sizable number of our associate members have never known a world without free software and the FSF. Some of these associate members may not even know a world without technology ruling everyday decisions, all the more reason to strengthen the free software movement and spread its philosophy. User freedom is the answer to the current and projected loss of autonomy in this digital era. The free software movement has a long and fascinating history, but also much to look forward to. This is a time to reflect, come together, and ensure that the free software community will be even stronger forty years from now.

We need your voice!

Since 1985, we have fought for our mission of user freedom. Today, the FSF and its licenses are often criticized for our insistence on freedom, while simultaneously, our name and that of our licenses carry a guaranteed stamp of user respect that corporations attempt to exploit. This hypocrisy is exactly why we are proudly supported by individuals like yourself (who we rely on as our main source of income), instead of outside influences.

After a period of internal focus on the FSF's operations and governance, we now stand firmly as a remote organization, with a board consisting of eight highly qualified directors, a balanced budget, a diverse and thoughtful annual program, and a stronger than ever focus on user freedom and protecting our licenses. The work speaks for itself, as illustrated by some of our achievements from the last few months, all made possible thanks to you:

• Our work to define the criteria for a free machine learning system has continued. While speaking publicly and in private with audiences and experts, we are now closing in on a statement of criteria. Just as importantly, we are also becoming increasingly knowledgeable on the topic and its consequences for our society with help from the community;

• Nearly thirty events were held globally with the help of the FSF in May in twenty countries. This LibreLocal month is a new initiative I am particularly excited about to help us grow our community, share knowledge, and facilitate local connections;

• We continued blocking, fighting, and educating how to counter the continued web-scraping DDoS attacks that have come with the rise of machine learning to our organization and many others. Imagine five million unique IPs crawling the site at once. It requires a serious up-scaling of our defenses, which you can read more about in this season's Free Software Bulletin;

• We submitted an amicus brief in the appeals case entitled Neo4j, inc., et al v. Suhy, et al. to defend user freedom and Section 7 of the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 (AGPLv3). Our previous work with Neo4j had already pushed the company to correct its errors, and with the amicus brief, we made it clear to the court and the public that the GNU licenses explicitly allow users to remove restrictions incompatible with the four freedoms; and

• We radically improved our infrastructure by building and deploying four servers with new disks and replaced motherboards that all run 100% free software down to their BIOS. With increased CPU and RAM growing our capacity, we secured the infrastructure for GNU and other free software projects.

The FSF has been advocating for software freedom for forty years, and having you as an ally empowered our journey, which is why we have made it this far. We know not everyone is in a position to, but if you can, can you support our efforts by becoming an associate member to help us reach our fundraising goal of 200 new members and fund our work? What we need are more allies like you to contribute wherever and however you can. We need more resources, because in our digital world it can feel like others hold the reins and dictate how we live our lives. We have to do more. By supporting us today, you help secure our future. Associate members will also be able to enjoy all the member benefits. If you can't afford a membership yourself, you can apply to have an FSF associate membership sponsored for you.

By staying true to our mission and growing the community, we will continue to shift the balance toward user freedom.

We make efficient use of what we already have, but what we have seen over these forty years is that the need has never been greater -- with your help, we can double our reach, triple our impact, and quadruple the amount of support free software has globally. The FSF will do everything to defend user rights and sustain free software as a force that cannot be ignored for as long as it's necessary. With your continued support, we will be here to serve users everywhere for generations to come.

Yours in freedom,

Zoë Kooyman
Executive Director

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