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Read and share online: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/2026-values-into-practice

Dear Free Software Supporter,

Ian Kelling, Free Software Foundation (FSF) senior systems administrator and our president, outlines the complex steps the FSF tech team goes through to ensure the software we use is free. The tech team — currently just two people — is vital to our collective work for software freedom, which itself helps guarantee many of our other basic freedoms. We depend on people just like you to support our work: we have an associate membership drive to welcome 100 new members by January 16. Please join the FSF and help keep this work going.

My name is Ian Kelling. I am the senior systems administrator at the FSF and also the president of the FSF, a role I fulfill on a voluntary basis. The FSF tech team runs a lot of software, including sixty-three different services, platforms, and websites for the FSF staff, the GNU Project, other community projects, and the wider free software community. We work hard to do it all on our own computers, so we maintain a dozen physical servers in two Boston data centers.

The tech team isn't one of the more publicly visible teams at the FSF. Behind the scenes, we put in a lot of effort to be able to do our work in software freedom and help others do the same. This isn't just something we have to do in minor edge cases; we can only host conferences, schedule meetings, and process financial transactions as a result of this work. We're glad to say it helps thousands. The work we put in to making sure a program is free for us also makes it free for the rest of the world.

We are always on the lookout for new software. There are hundreds of thousands of useful free software programs in the world; figuring out which ones to use and whether a program is free software is a challenge we tackle regularly. The first place we often look for a free program is in the package repository of a free as in freedom GNU/Linux distribution, such as Trisquel in our case. To search the repository, I usually start with the standard command-line approach of apt-cache search. This searches through tens of thousands of packages. One of the biggest reasons we start with this method is that we know that this software has gone through a thorough review to determine it is free by the developers of the operating system. There is another notable collection of verified free software that can search through because of a program we run ourselves: the Free Software Directory. When searching both places doesn't yield a good result, we look further afield to a search engine or Wikipedia.

Working with others to avoid nonfree software

During the COVID-19 pandemic, like everyone everywhere, the FSF increased its videoconferencing use, especially videoconferencing software that works in web browsers. We have experience hosting several different programs to accomplish this, and BigBlueButton was an important one for us for a while. It is a videoconferencing service which describes itself as a virtual classroom because of its many features designed for educational environments, such as a shared whiteboard.

When we find a program outside of a trusted source that looks promising, one of the first things we do is to review the license(s) of the software, and check that it comes with source code, not just opaque binaries or minified JavaScript. It is usually pretty easy to find some indication of the license or licenses the program is under, but based on experience, we don't trust the first indication we find. The FSF has documented a basic process of verifying that software is free, and on the tech team, we have a lot of experience in digging deeper. I'd love to document more of that, but keep in mind that the FSF tech team is just two people trying to accomplish as much as we can for the free software movement. We rely on contributions from people like you.

I recently re-reviewed the licensing for BigBlueButton and it took me about four hours. (For reference: I checked a recent development version, git commit b14adecd). BigBlueButton includes hundreds of NodeJS JavaScript dependencies, which calls for some additional automation. I use the ScanCode like ScanCode Toolkit, and I also check the npm license metadata using npx license-checker.

Why did I re-review BigBlueButton? In BigBlueButton 2.2, the program used a freely licensed version of MongoDB, but it unintentionally picked up MongoDB's 2018 nonfree license change in versions 2.3 and 2.4. At the FSF, we noticed this and raised the alarm with the BigBlueButton team in late 2020. In many cases of a developer changing to a nonfree license, free forks have won out, but in this case no one judged it worth the effort to maintain a fork of the final free MongoDB version. This was a very unfortunate case for existing users of MongoDB, including the FSF, who were then faced with a challenge of maintaining their freedom by either running old and unmaintained software or switching over to a different free program.

Luckily, the free software world is not especially lacking in high quality database software, and there is also a wide array of free videoconferencing software. At the FSF, we decided to spend some effort to make sure MongoDB would no longer make BigBlueButton nonfree, to help other users of MongoDB and BigBlueButton. We think BigBlueButton is really useful for free software in schools, where it is incredibly important to have free software.

On the tech team, especially when it comes to software running in a web browser, we are used to making modifications to better suit our needs. In the end, we didn't find a perfect solution, but we did find FerretDB to be a promising MongoDB alternative and assisted the developers of FerretDB to see what would be required for it to work in BigBlueButton. The BigBlueButton developers decided that some architectural level changes for their 3.0 release would be the path for them to remove MongoDB. As of BigBlueButton 3.0, released in 2025, BigBlueButton is back to being entirely free software!

The importance of licensing

As the amount of free software programs is vast, there are also a great deal of free and nonfree software licenses. We have a licensing team which reviews licenses and publishes their findings, and as that page states, "If you are contemplating writing a new license, please also contact us at [email protected]. The proliferation of different free software licenses is a significant problem in the free software community today, both for users and developers." There is no way for the FSF to publish an evaluation of every free license, much less every nonfree license we encounter in the wild, so we have to use our best judgment. If the FSF hasn't published an evaluation of a license, a good question to ask is whether it is used by any package distributed in a libre GNU/Linux distribution.

Sometimes if you search online for what other people say about a license, the results can be misleading. MongoDB joined a very long-running trend of companies dubiously claiming an association with the FSF's work or the free software movement for their benefit. We run into various license terms which look a bit similar to copyleft and get called copyleft, but they are not copyleft. For example, as you can find on the FSF's license review list, the Reciprocal Public License is nonfree for reasons which include its: "requiring publication of any modified version that an organization uses, even privately." People have mistaken that requirement to mean that the license is copyleft. It isn't; it is a nonfree restriction. If you see a license that claims to be copyleft, I suggest checking https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html, and to otherwise be skeptical. If a license says it is based on the GPL, consider that it might be better described as a gross perversion of the GPL rather than based on it.

Can you support our work to host services for the free software movement and help make computing free (as in freedom) for all? We can't do any of this without your help. If you can, will you become an associate member? We need just 50 more members to reach our associate membership goal of 100 new associate members by January 16. Doing so will also get you access to our many membership benefits, and is just $12 USD per month ($6 for students).

As you can see, in the world of free software, trust can be tricky, and this is part of why organizations like the FSF are so important. In a world so big, we need the FSF to have the resources, including the financial, to put the values of free software into practice and help other people do it in order to spread the free software movement across the globe. And, with a team of just 11 people, your support makes a real difference to us.

Yours in freedom,

Ian Kelling
President and senior systems administrator