Read and share online: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/fsf-licensing-compliance-lab-2018-and-the-future

Dear Ruben Safir,

2018 marked my tenth year working for the Free Software Foundation
(FSF) and its Licensing and Compliance Lab. It was a year of
celebration, but also a time of reflection.

I am the current licensing and compliance manager for the FSF, though
I've had several roles in my time here. The Lab handles all the free
software licensing work for the FSF. Copyleft is the best legal tool
we have for protecting the rights of users, and the Lab makes sure
that tool is at full power by providing fundamental licensing
education. From publishing articles and resources on free software
licensing, to doing license compliance work for the GNU Project,
to handling our certification programs like Respects Your
Freedom, if there is a license involved, the Lab is on the case.

When I started working at the FSF part-time in 2008, the GNU General
Public License version 3 (GPLv3) was only a year old. Our Respects
Your Freedom certification program didn't yet exist. The Free
Software Directory wasn't yet a wiki that could be updated by the
community at large. Things have changed a lot over the years, as has
our ability to help users to understand and share freely licensed
works. I'd like to take just a moment as 2018 draws to a close to look
back on some of the great work we accomplished.

While the GPLv3 celebrated its tenth anniversary last year, there
still remains a lot to be done in helping developers understand how to
best use it and other GNU licenses. The Licensing and Compliance Lab,
along with a team of volunteers, has for many years answered questions
from the community. This year, we were delighted for Jake Glass
to join the team as an intern, and are grateful for his help in
improving licensing materials as well as answering questions from the
community. The world of free software has grown so much over the past
decade that we want to help make it as easy as possible to use free
software and track the licenses in projects. Many organizations are
developing tools to help tackle this issue, such as the Software
Package Data Exchange (SPDX). But these tools are only useful if
they are accurate and support best practices. Looking to improve the
situation, we worked together with SPDX to make sure that their
identifiers correctly reflected the licensing choices of
developers. In 2018, we were happy to announce that SPDX updated
their identifiers to differentiate between choosing only a
specific version of a GNU license versus that version or any later
version (e.g. GPLv3-only or GPLv3-or-any-later-version). This is just
one example of our ongoing work interfacing with other organizations
and projects in order to improve the culture of free software
licensing for everyone.

This year also saw more growth in our Respects Your Freedom
certification program. This program helps users to find hardware
devices they can trust to respect their freedom and privacy. We were
excited to add another laptop/tablet hybrid with the Minifree
Libreboot X200 Tablet. While we have previously certified many
Librebooted laptops, 2018 was the year we finally certified a
device to help you Libreboot your own device: the Zerocat Chipflasher
Board Edition 1. While we celebrate reaching thirty total
certified devices, we are looking forward to even more exciting
additions in the future, with over fifty devices currently working
their way through certification. Watching this important program grow
so fast from the beginning has been incredibly rewarding.

2018 also saw the return of our Continuing Legal Education
seminars. While executive director John Sullivan and I give many
licensing talks at conferences throughout the year geared towards a
more general audience, these seminars are sessions meant for legal
professionals and interested licensing geeks to dive deeply into their
understanding of the GPL and to help people understand how the
Principles of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement work. It's an
opportunity to teach the law and history of free software, as well as
to connect with legal practitioners from around the world. The last
seminar prior to this was over four years ago, so we were long overdue
to run another. Looking to the future, we plan on making these
seminars a more regular occurrence.

The Free Software Directory saw a major milestone in the past
year, surpassing 16,000 listed packages. We were also aided by the
tech team interns, David Hedlund and Sonali Singhal. David
is a long-time Directory volunteer who exemplifies the way that
program grew and developed over the past decade. David long ago took a
leadership role in updating and improving the Directory, and we were
grateful that he was able to take a role as an intern to extend that
work even further. Sonali was an Outreachy intern who was able
to upgrade the software running the Directory itself. This important
work helps keep the Directory running while putting us in a great
place for the future. However, while we celebrate the accomplishments
of this year, there's clearly a lot more work to be done in order to
ensure that the Free Software Directory truly lists every free
software package in existence.

Even as 2018 demonstrates how much the size of our job grew in the
past decade, the size of our team hasn't quite kept the same
pace. When I started, there were just one and a half staff members
dedicated to licensing at the FSF -- Brett Smith was the licensing and
compliance manager at the time, and I was working with him
part-time. I later moved to full time, and since then the team has
stayed at just two staff members working with a team of paid and pro
bono attorneys. Just think: we've expanded many programs, and created
whole new ones, while still maintaining all the other programs of the
Compliance Lab with just two staff. It's really a testament to
what we can accomplish. Looking back over the past ten years fills me
with pride, but also awe at the size of the job in front of us.

Reviewing past accomplishments always makes one think of challenges
not yet met. We have to keep expanding and improving our work, if we
want the next ten years to be as successful. But as always, that
depends in large part on you. None of what we've done would have been
possible without your support, and nothing that we hope for in the
future will happen without your help. Will you build the foundation
for the next great expansion?

The Licensing and Compliance team's work is fueled primarily by donors
and associate members of the FSF, supporting our mission to take
software freedom to new frontiers. We are asking you to become an
associate member or make a donation to the FSF to support
our work over the next year. Membership costs as little as $10 per
month ($5 per month for students). Membership comes with
benefits, and if you join by the end of 2018, you can choose to
receive an enamel pin set, so you can wear your free software pride on
your sleeve wherever you go.

Thank you for everything you do for free software and the FSF!

Sincerely,

Donald Robertson, III

Licensing and Compliance Manager