Read and share online: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/help-the-fsf-tech-team-build-the-future-of-free-software

Dear Ruben Safir,

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) tech team works every
day to maintain and improve the infrastructure that supports hundreds
of free software projects, and the FSF itself with its mission to
create a world where all software is free. Will you propel the free
software movement to new frontiers by supporting the FSF? Our annual
fundraiser is happening right now, and we want to welcome 400 new
Associate Members before the end of the year. So far, we have 100! You can
join for as little as $10 per month ($5 per month for students)
or make a donation. As a special bonus, all new and
renewing Annual Associate Members ($120+) can choose to receive a
set of enamel pins. Become a member or make a donation today.

The FSF tech team has been busy over the last year. Our small
three-person band supports FSF and GNU infrastructure, and we work
hard to improve the services we provide. All of this infrastructure
runs on free software and is self-hosted: for example, we use
CiviCRM to manage events, campaigns, mailing lists, and our
database of members; our new member forum is powered by
Discourse; and we used tools like HUBAngl and GNU
MediaGoblin to stream, record, and publish 30+ hours of
video from LibrePlanet 2018. Much of our infrastructure is
routinely under an impressive load -- the Mailman list server we
run for hundreds of free software projects continues to spool out
nearly a half-million messages per day.

We don't do this work alone. We are fortunate to have both a worldwide
community of volunteers and a thriving internship program. The
six interns we mentored over the past year have inspired us with their
work and dedication. Projects they worked on include:

• A free software replacement for PayPal's nonfree JavaScript,
  which can be run from the command line;




• A physical system for remotely resetting unresponsive servers
  with freedom-respecting software;




• Upgrades and improvements to the Free Software
  Directory;




• The replacement of the GNU Image Manipulation Program's old JPEG
  codec with a well-maintained library;




• Researching site monitoring systems like Prometheus;




• Testing Pagure, a code collaboration platform; and




• Researching the code used for license selection in GitLab, to
  facilitate future patches.

Two of our interns came to us from Outreachy, which connects
underrepresented people with paid internships working on free software
projects. In addition to completing the above specific projects, our
interns are now better prepared to take on future challenges within
free software. We're proud that we helped them deepen their
involvement in the movement.

We rely on volunteers to provide and maintain services to support
thousands of free software developers around the world. An important
part of what we do as staff is make sure those volunteers have what
they need. Volunteers continue to maintain Savannah, which hosts
both GNU and non-GNU code, and to take care of https://www.gnu.org
and its translations.

In addition to supporting free software development and advocacy by
others, the team also directly funds some upstream contributions. We
are not just users of free software -- we also submit patches and bug
reports to the projects we rely on. When we have the resources, we
fund extra development in areas that are particularly important for
user freedom. This year, we contracted with the author of the popular
browser extension NoScript to do major improvements on GNU
LibreJS, giving a significant boost to the campaign for
protecting users against proprietary JavaScript.

We also use our position as technical representatives of an
established institution in the world of free software to attract new
kinds of resources to the movement. Currently, we are working with
students at the UC Berkeley Blueprint program to develop software
which will enable people around the world to more easily support the
free software movement both financially and with their activist
energy.

We've done a lot this year, but there are also many projects we didn't
get to, and new projects that we want to take on in 2019. We want to
spend more time directly supporting and improving the GNU Project
infrastructure beyond the maintenance of the services we host. We
would like to provide better options for developers who want to host
their projects with organizations that share their commitment to free
software principles; we want to be offering a more attractive public
online presence for the FSF itself; and we need to show that a
nonprofit can be best-in-class in its operations and at its mission
without giving up its freedom to Service as a Software
Substitute or proprietary software.

Thanks to the generous donations we've received this past year, we are
building our capacity to take on these challenges. Ruben Rodriguez,
formerly a senior systems administrator, has taken on a new role as
our chief technology officer. Ruben's new role affords him time each
week to continue contributing to Trisquel, a fully free GNU/Linux
operating system. Andrew Engelbrecht, previously our Web
developer, has joined Ian Kelling as a senior systems administrator,
which means we're currently hiring for a Web developer. We're
excited to be growing from a trio to a quartet, but we also know we
could keep a whole orchestra productively busy.

In order to continue our work and push free software to new frontiers,
the FSF tech team needs your help. Much like free software
itself, the FSF is only as strong as the communities of users and
contributors that support it. I encourage you to do what you can to
give us the boost we need to start 2019 strong.

Yours in freedom,

Andrew Engelbrecht, Senior Systems Administrator,

and the Free Software Foundation Tech Team