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Read and share online: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/support-licensing-in-its-continued-mission-to-serve-and-educate
Dear Free Software
Supporter,
Searching for and finding a reason to support free software can begin
with a simple idea. An idea that you value your privacy. An idea that
devices shouldn't be designed with planned obsolescence. An idea that
once you buy a computer, it is entirely yours, not something owned
or controlled by others. Once someone has a reason to support free
software, their next inevitable step is a call to action, and the Free
Software Foundation’s (FSF) licensing and compliance team works
hard to provide freedom-seekers the support they need to guide
themselves to freedom.
Answering your questions
The FSF licensing and compliance team is here to help with one of
civilization's most useful concepts: the question. Do you have a
question about free software licensing or how the GNU General Public
License (GPL) works? We have answers. With the help of our
knowledgeable and experienced licensing volunteers, we answer the
public's licensing questions. There is no limit to the type of questions we
receive at [email protected] -- from free software developers, to
concerned users, to the occasional person wondering what the GPL is
when they've seen it somewhere unexpected. If the question pertains in
some way to GNU licensing, and the answer is not already on our GPL
FAQ, then we may want to add it. Maybe your next question will
help improve the GPL FAQ to everyone's benefit.
Find your reason -- and the Free Software Directory
The licensing team currently consists of just one full-time staff
member, together with a handful of volunteers, to do important
activities such as holding the weekly Free Software Directory (FSD)
meetings and improving our communications tools to help coordinate our
efforts. We are always exploring ways to transform our work into
useful educational materials, but we need your help. With your
contribution today, we can continue to be the lighthouse guiding
users towards software freedom one question at a time. For those
interested in becoming licensing volunteers, you may start with our
licensing quiz to get an idea of what's involved.
Every Friday from 12:00 - 15:00 EDT (16:00 - 19:00 UTC), a licensing
team member is available to help others evaluate the licensing of
software in order to catalog it in the Free Software
Directory. The Directory has close to 17,000 entries that have
been evaluated and determined to be free software. By reviewing these
packages, the reviewer adds this skill to their toolkit and the
community benefits from having these programs confirmed as free
software, allowing users to run, edit, share, and modify them.
Just recently, we have started regular announcements of upcoming FSD
meetings on the FSF events feed, and we recap them in the
(previously on hiatus) Directory blog feed, and we published a
new article in the latest Free Software Bulletin. We have
also begun efforts to relaunch "GPL interviews" and now have a
few interviews in the works that we look forward to showcasing in the
coming months. If you have a GPL or Affero General Public license
(AGPL) program and you are interested in sharing why you chose a
copyleft, free software license, please send us an email at
[email protected]. And in the mean time, our work processing
copyright assignments also continues.
Meeting new challenges
In the summer of 2021, Microsoft debuted a new freedom-exploiting
technology in the form of GitHub's Copilot, an AI-driven
Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS) program that
auto-completes code for developers as they write software. The FSF put
out a call for whitepapers to address the philosophical and
legal questions that were springing up like dandelions across the free
software community's grassy fields. The five selected whitepapers
were published in February 2022 and over the next couple of
months, the papers were downloaded over 9,000 times. The licensing and
compliance team is proud to rally the community in this way, and with
your contribution today, we can continue to do so in the future.
Today's the last day of the fundraiser, and we are so close to
reaching our spring fundraising goal of USD 67,000. Any
financial contribution you can make goes to help the campaigns
team spread the message of free software. For only $10 a month ($5 if
you are a student), you can join us as an FSF associate
member. Bringing new members to the community is a core part of the
fight for software freedom, and helps us build a foundation of
committed activists for years to come. It will help us create
introductory materials such as these, in which we can assist people
directly in their journey to learn more about free software.
Getting the word out is just as important: please take a moment to
publicly bring attention to the need for free software! Use the
hashtag #UserFreedom, and share this message and others to help us
build even further support.
As we are coming out of the pandemic and getting comfortable with the
"new normal," (whatever that means) the licensing and compliance team
will continue to work hard and strive to answer to the community as
much as we can. Part of this effort is to hire a licensing and
compliance manager with the knowledge and skill to do just that.
With your help, we will continue our path forward and improve our
results even more.
In freedom,
Craig Topham,
Copyright & Licensing Associate
Images Copyright © 2022 Free Software Foundation, Inc., licensed under
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
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