FSF

The following is a letter I received as an associate member of the Free Software Foundation few days ago (August 2007), but written on July 13, 2007.

Dear . .,

Help us build Libre Planet - a base for free software activists and community. Your support will help launch Libre Planet by August 2007!

Chamindra de Silva and his colleagues from the Sahana project traveled from Indonesia to Cambridge Massachusetts, in March of this year so that the FSF could award them the Free Software Award for Projects of Social Benefit for their efforts in the wake of the tsunami that devastated Southeast Asia in 2004.

The "World Domination 201" writing made an impact on some parts of the Free Software community, including myself as I found myself in agreement. However, as I believe in Free Software and hence tend to prioritize the issue of freedom I was interested in hearing what Richard Stallman, the head of the FSF, has to say about it. So I fired up the following email. Please excuse the length, I was eager to explain what WD201 means and how I understand it.

Free Software Foundation, or FSF for short, is one of the most controversial information technology related organizations. Some people hate it and some people love it. Neither can change the fact that it has had a tremendous influence on what many today tend to call the "open source" phenomenon which is in fact lying on the very foundations that the FSF represents: Free Software and the Free Software philosophy. Variations of this philosophy have sprung up into new, but similar philosophies due to differing motivations and goals. You can read more about it in our recent "Facts and Friction on Open Source and Free Software" article.

The Free Software Foundation acts as the benevolent force guiding the computer industry. It protects the users of software from the baddies, the list of which very often includes the names Microsoft, Apple, and TiVo.

But what happens when the benevolent force transforms into something of a hypocrit?

The Free Software Foundation has an official list of Free GNU/Linux distributions. That is, distros that don’t include any non-free software in the mainline distribution image or package repositories. With that in mind, the said list is quite selective. The names of the distributions are as follows:

A recent article by LinuxJournal's Nicholas Petreley, named "A five year deal with Microsoft to dump Novell/SUSE", points to the contradiction in statements of the two companies in regard to the patent infringement issue and calls for two things, for customers and users to essentially boycott Novell SuSE ("first front") and FSF to take a stand and actually sue Novell ("second front"). The latter is obvious from a statement which also reflects an apparent disagreement with GPLv3 as means of combating DRM, quoting:

"The Free Software Foundation lawyers should stop wasting its time trying to eradicate DRM through licenses that won't get adopted or work, and spend their time enforcing the license that is already in widespread use. Take Novell to court over its violation of section 7 of the GPL. Force Novell to explain why it is paying Microsoft royalties to guarantee that Microsoft won't sue its customers over patent infringements that do not exist."