Free Software Foundation
Abbreviation	FSF
Motto	Free Software, Free Society
Formation	1985-10-04
Type	NGO and Non-profit organization
Legal status	Foundation
Purpose/focus	Educational
Headquarters	Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Region served	Worldwide
Membership	Private individuals and corporate patrons
President	Richard Stallman
Affiliations	Software Freedom Law Center
Staff	11[1]
Website	http://www.fsf.org/

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the free software movement, a copyleft-based movement which aims to promote the universal freedom to create, distribute and modify computer software. The FSF is incorporated in Massachusetts, USA.^[2]

From its founding until the mid-1990s, FSF's funds were mostly used to employ software developers to write free software for the GNU Project. Since the mid-1990s, the FSF's employees and volunteers have mostly worked on legal and structural issues for the free software movement and the free software community.

Consistent with its goals, only free software is used on FSF's computers.^[3]

[edit] GPL enforcement

The FSF holds the copyrights on various essential pieces of the GNU system, such as GNU Compiler Collection. As copyright holder, it has exclusive authority to enforce the GNU General Public License (GPL) when copyright infringement occurs on that software. While other copyright holders of other software systems adopted the GPL as their license, FSF was the only organization to regularly assert its copyright interests on software so licensed until Harald Welte launched gpl-violations.org in 2004.

From 1991 until 2001, GPL enforcement was done informally, usually by Stallman himself, often with assistance from FSF's lawyer, Eben Moglen.^{[citation needed]} Typically, GPL violations during this time were cleared up by short email exchanges between Stallman and the violator.^{[citation needed]}

In late 2001, Bradley M. Kuhn (then Executive Director), with the assistance of Moglen, David Turner, and Peter T. Brown, formalized these efforts into FSF's GPL Compliance Labs. From 2002-2004, high profile GPL enforcement cases, such as those against Linksys and OpenTV, became frequent.^[4][5][6]

GPL enforcement and educational campaigns on GPL compliance was a major focus of the FSF's efforts during this period.^[7][8]

In December 2008 FSF filed a lawsuit against Cisco for using GPL-licensed components shipped with Linksys products. Cisco was notified of the licensing issue in 2003 but Cisco repeatedly disregarded its obligations under the GPL.^[9] In May 2009 FSF dropped the lawsuit when Cisco agreed to make a monetary donation to the FSF and appoint a Free Software Director to conduct continuous reviews of the company's license compliance practices.^[10]

[edit] Legal seminars

From 2003 to 2005, FSF held legal seminars to explain the GPL and the law around it.^[11] Usually taught by Bradley M. Kuhn and Daniel Ravicher, these seminars offered CLE credit and were the first effort to give formal legal education on the GPL.^[12][13][14]

[edit] Current and ongoing activities

The GNU project

The original purpose of the FSF was to promote the ideals of free software. The organization developed the GNU operating system as an example of this.

GNU licenses

The GNU General Public License (GPL) is a widely used license for free software projects. The current version (version 3) was released in June 2007. The FSF has also published the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), and the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL).

GNU Press

The FSF's publishing department, responsible for "publishing affordable books on computer science using freely distributable licenses."

The Free Software Directory 

This is a listing of software packages which have been verified as free software. Each package entry contains 47 pieces of information such as the project's homepage, developers, programming language, etc. The goals are to provide a search engine for free software, and to provide a cross-reference for users to check if a package has been verified as being free software. FSF has received a small amount of funding from UNESCO for this project. It is hoped that the directory can be translated into many languages in the future^{[by whom?]}.

Maintaining the Free Software Definition 

FSF maintains many of the documents that define the free software movement.

Project hosting

FSF hosts software development projects on their Savannah website.

Political campaigns 

FSF sponsors a number of campaigns against what it perceives as dangers to software freedom, including software patents, digital rights management (which the FSF has re-termed "digital restrictions management", as part of their effort to highlight their view that such technologies are "designed to take away and limit your rights,"^[15]) and user interface copyright. Defective by Design is an FSF-initiated campaign against DRM. They also have a campaign to promote Ogg+Vorbis, a free alternative to proprietary formats like MP3 and AAC. They also sponsor some free software projects that are deemed to be "high-priority".

Annual awards

"Award for the Advancement of Free Software" and "Free Software Award for Projects of Social Benefit"

[edit] High priority projects

gNewSense is a distribution officially supported by the FSF

The FSF maintains a list of "high priority projects" to which the Foundation claims that "there is a vital need to draw the free software community's attention".^[16] The FSF considers these projects "important because computer users are continually being seduced into using non-free software, because there is no adequate free replacement."^[16]

Previous projects highlighted as needing work included the Free Java implementations, GNU Classpath, and GNU Compiler for Java, which ensure compatibility for the Java part of OpenOffice.org, and the GNOME desktop environment (see Java: Licensing).^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Recognition

• 1999: Linus Torvalds Award for Open Source Computing^[17]
• 2005: Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction in the category of "Digital Communities"^[18]

[edit] Structure

The FSF's board of directors is:

• Hal Abelson, Founding member,^[19] Professor of Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (served from inception until March 5, 1998, and rejoined circa 2005)
• Geoffery Knauth, Senior Software Engineer at SFA, Inc. (served since October 23, 1997)
• Henry Poole, Founder of CivicActions, a grassroots campaign technology consulting firm. (served since December 12, 2002)
• Richard Stallman, Founding President, launched the GNU project, author of the GNU General Public License (served as President since inception)
• Gerald Jay Sussman, Professor of Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (served since inception)
• Benjamin Mako Hill, graduate student at the MIT Media Lab. (served since July 25, 2007)
• Bradley Kuhn, technology director of the Software Freedom Law Center, former FSF Executive Director (served since March 25, 2010) ^[20]

Previous board members include:

• Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford University (served since March 28, 2004 until 2008)
• Robert J. Chassell, Founding Treasurer,^[19] as well as a Founding Director (served from inception until June 3, 1997)
• Len Tower Jr., Founding member,^[19] served until September 2, 1997
• Miguel de Icaza (served from August 1999^[21] until February 25, 2002.^[22])
• Eben Moglen (served from July 28, 2000^[23] until 2007^[24])

The FSF Board of Directors is elected by the Voting Membership, whose powers include at least this are outlined in the by-laws:^[25]

In addition to the right to elect Directors as provided in the by-laws and such other powers and rights as may be vested in them by law, these Articles of Organization or the by-laws, the Voting Members shall have such other powers and rights as the Directors may designate.

'Articles of Amendment, Free Software Foundation, Inc.

There are currently no known documents available that indicate the composition of the FSF's Voting Membership.^{[citation needed]}

At any given time, there are usually around a dozen employees.^[26] Most, but not all, work at the FSF headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts.^[27]

Eben Moglen and Dan Ravicher previously served individually as pro bono legal counsel to the FSF. Since the forming of the Software Freedom Law Center, legal services to the FSF are provided by that organization.

On November 25, 2002, the FSF launched the FSF Associate Membership program for individuals.^[28] Bradley M. Kuhn (FSF Executive Director, 2001'2005) launched the program and also signed up as the first Associate Member^[29]

Associate members hold a purely honorary and funding support role to the FSF.^[30]

[edit] SCO lawsuit

In March 2003, SCO filed suit against IBM alleging that IBM's contributions to various free software, including FSF's GNU, violated SCO's rights. While FSF was never a party to the lawsuit, FSF was subpoenaed on November 5, 2003.^[31] During 2003 and 2004, FSF put substantial advocacy effort into responding to the lawsuit and quelling its negative impact on the adoption and promotion of free software.^[32][33]

[edit] Criticism

On May 2, 2010, Ed Bott of ZDNet noted that the FSF made several factual errors on the front page of their PlayOgg campaign and accused the author of deliberately attempting to misinform.^[34] The errors include the patent nature of the ogg format, the details of the Alcatel-Lucent versus Microsoft lawsuit and the accusation that proprietary software players and formats "spy" on users.

On July 22nd, 2009, Christopher Smart of Linux Magazine interviewed Linus Torvalds in response to Microsoft submitting code for the Linux kernel. Torvalds was quoted as saying that he does not want to be associated with "free software" and criticized the movement for having "extremists".^[35]

Torvalds had previously criticized Stallman and the enforcement of GPL in a posting on the Linux Kernel forum in October, 2004.^[36]

On June 16th, 2010, Joe Brockmeier (another journalist of Linux Magazine) criticized the practices of the FSF, calling their campaigns, such as Defective by Design, "negative" and "juvenile" and not being adequate for providing users with "credible alternatives" to proprietary software.^[37]

[edit] See also

free software portal

• BadVista
• Defective by Design
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Software Freedom Law Center
• List of Linux distributions endorsed by the Free Software Foundation
• Free Software Foundation Europe
• Free Software Foundation India
• Free Software Foundation Latin America

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Official website

v ' d ' e Free Software Foundation People Richard M. Stallman GNU Project GNU General Public License Other projects Free Software Directory – FSF Free Software Awards – BadVista – Defective by Design Sister organizations Europe – Latin America – India See also List of Linux distributions endorsed by the Free Software Foundation

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