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Read and share online: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/the-fsf-tech-team-doing-more-for-free-software
Dear Free Software Supporter,
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) tech team works every day to
maintain and improve the infrastructure that supports hundreds of free
software projects, along with the FSF itself, in its mission to create
a world where all software respects our freedom and dignity. Our
associate members are the heart of this commitment, and we couldn't do
it without your help.
Thank you for being a part of the free software movement. Our annual
fundraiser is happening right now. Will you take the next step and
become an associate member today to help us reach our goal of
welcoming 600 new associate members before December 31st? As a special
bonus, all new and renewing annual associate members ($120+) can
choose to receive one of our exclusive year-end gifts. If you can't
become a member yourself, you can make a donation instead. Every
dollar you contribute helps the tech team support the development of
software that respects your freedom.
Below is a message from our chief technology officer, Ruben Rodriguez
Perez, about the services provided by our tech team.
At the Free Software Foundation, we like to set big goals for
ourselves, and cover a lot of ground in a short time. The FSF tech team,
for example, has just four members -- two senior systems
administrators, one Web developer, and a part-time chief technology
officer -- yet we manage to run over 120 virtual servers. These run on
about a dozen machines hosted at four different data centers. These
include many public-facing Web sites and community services, as well
as every single IT requirement for the staff: workstations, data
storage and backup, networking, printing, accounting, telephony,
email, you name it.
We don't outsource any of our daily software needs because we need to
be sure that they are done using only free software. Remember, there
is no "cloud," just other people's computers. For example: we don't
outsource our email, so every day we send over half a million messages
to thousands of free software hackers through the community mailing
lists we host. We also don't outsource our Web storage or networking,
so we serve tens of thousands of free software downloads -- over 1.5
terabytes of data -- a day. And our popularity, and the critical
nature of the resources we make available, make us a target for denial
of service attacks (one is ongoing as we write this), requiring
constant monitoring by the tech team, whose members take turns being
ready for emergency work so that the resources our supporters depend
on stay available.
As hard as we work, we still want to do more, like increasing our
already strict standards on hardware compliance, so in 2020, we will
finish replacing the few remaining servers that require a nonfree
BIOS. To be compliant to our own high standards, we need to be
working with devices that are available through Respects Your
Freedom retailers. We plan to add new machines
to our farm, so that we can host more community servers like the ones
we already host for KDE, SugarLabs, GNU Guix,
Replicant, gNewSense, GNU Linux-Libre, and
FSFLA. We provide completely virtual machines that these
projects use for their daily operations, whether that's Web hosting,
mailing lists, software repositories, or compiling and testing
software packages.
We know that many software projects and individual hackers are looking
for more options on code hosting services that focus on freedom and
privacy, so we are working to set up a public site that anybody can
use to publish, collaborate, or document their progress on free
software projects. We will follow strict criteria to ensure that this
code repository hosts only fully free software, and that it follows
the very best practices towards freedom and privacy.
Another project that we are very excited about for this year is a
long-awaited refresh of https://www.fsf.org. Not only will it be
restyled, but also easier to browse on mobile devices. As our
campaigns and licensing teams are eager to create and publish more
resources in different formats, we will also work to improve the
support for publishing audio and video files on the site. And to
enable you to do more, too, we are also developing a site to
organize petitions and collect signatures, so that together we can run
more effective grassroots campaigns and fight for the freedom of all
computer users.
All of these efforts require countless hours of hard work, and the use
of high quality hardware. These come to us at a significant cost, not
just to purchase, but to keep running and to host at specialized data
centers (if you have rack space in the Boston area, we are always
looking for donors). For all this work, we depend on the continuous
commitment of individual contributors to keep providing the technical
foundation to fight for software freedom.
In solidarity,
Ruben Rodriguez Perez
Chief Technology Officer
Photo by Michael McMahon Copyright © 2019 Free Software Foundation,
Inc., licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0. |
