Tech team members running the streaming systems at LibrePlanet 2019 (top) and 2020 (bottom).
Although only a team of four, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) tech
team delivers a huge range of services for the free software
community, providing infrastructure for not only the FSF, but also
hosting and mailing lists for hundreds of free software projects
around the world. They're a key part of our mission and commitment to
computer users, and pave the way for others to do their computing in
full freedom.
Can you pledge your support for the tech team's important work for
software freedom by becoming an associate member? The work of the
tech team depends directly on support from the wider free software
community, and the FSF can't fulfill its mission without you. This
fall fundraiser, our goal is to reach 500 new associate
members. If you join today, you can select a special gift in addition
to being able to enjoy all of our associate membership benefits,
which include the free "as in freedom" videoconferencing server
mentioned in this appeal.
The FSF is well-known for spearheading the advocacy and support of
free software, not just by recommending it in the face of pervasive
proprietary options, but also by condemning nonfree software
altogether. Following this recommendation is hard, even for us,
because of the ever-increasing dependency on software and computer
networks that we are all subject to. To follow through with our
commitment, our tech team maintains a large list of services that many
other offices our size would have long ago been wrongly pressured into
transferring to one of the handful of gigantic corporations that
monopolize those services.
Your work email account is most likely implemented through Gmail or
Outlook; your office's software is likely to be served by Amazon Web
Services, along with all the data backups; your company's customer
service is likely to be managed through Salesforce or SAP, and so
on. Make no mistake, this is true for your local government and school
networks, too!
In contrast, at the FSF, we never jumped on the outsourcing wagon, and
we don't use any Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS) in our
operations. We run our own email servers, telephony and fax service,
print shop, full server stack, backups, networking, systems
monitoring, accounting, customer relationship management (CRM)
software, and a long list of other tasks and software development
projects, with a team of just four extremely dedicated
technicians. And we implement this on hardware that has been carefully
evaluated to meet very high ethical standards, criteria that we push
for vendors to achieve through our Respects Your Freedom
certification program.
We are the first to understand how hard it can be for people to
liberate themselves, even more so when other problems in our lives
take away our attention and energy in times of hardship. But we must
be vigilant to not allow those hardships to be used as excuses to
further erode our freedom. Because of this, we try our best not to
just liberate our own organization, but to help the free software
community, and society at large, in this demanding process.
With this in mind, this year we implemented two free
videoconferencing services. One aimed to facilitate our associate
members' own private communications with their friends and
families through a Jitsi Meet instance. And to facilitate the
organization's exploration for running meetings and conferences with
fully free software, we started a BigBlueButton instance that has been
used for research and testing with the Boston Public Schools network,
the City of Cambridge, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT). It has also been used to run several online free software
conferences, including SeaGL and the FSF's thirty-fifth
anniversary event FSF35, and it will be used to run LibrePlanet
2021, on March 20 and 21, 2021.
To continue with this effort, these are some of the projects that we
have lined up for 2021:
Forge: We want to offer an alternative to GitHub and other
repositories that are not committed to freedom and
privacy. This service is needed by the free software developer
community in particular, but also by the larger community of
creators of freely licensed materials of all kinds. We will be
hosting our own repository implemented exclusively with free
software, and that will allow participants to export their
projects and migrate them to their own instances at any time.
New FSF Web site: Following the recent round of
improvements to our front page, we want to continue
modernizing our online presence by increasing user friendliness
and focusing on responsiveness.
Videoconferencing resources: Our associate members now have the
option to use our videoconferencing service to talk to
anyone they would like in freedom (including non-members), and
with more resources, we could potentially offer this to the
public. We are committed to show how organizations of all sizes --
from a classroom to a city government, online conference, or
university network -- can take control of their online
communication platforms by providing better documentation on how
to run your own videoconferencing instance.
Community servers: Aside from being the home for Emacs and many
other packages of the GNU Project, we also host community servers
for other free software projects, like KDE, Sugar Labs, Replicant,
GNewSense, and Trisquel. If your community abides by the
principles of free software, the FSF wants to have the capacity to
host your free software project through our infrastructure. This
is a project that is high on our wish list, and we are working on
obtaining the funds and resources to make this happen.
All of these efforts, including the often invisible ones we do to keep
the FSF's own high standards for internal operation, could not be
possible without your help and generous contributions. The Free
Software Foundation is primarily sustained by individual donations and
memberships, keeping us independent. We hope you'll continue
supporting our efforts so that we can continue to expand our services
to an ever-growing audience, until the day that free software is the
rule, rather than the exception.
