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Read and share online:
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/the-board-process-the-gnu-cauldron-saass-and-more

Dear Ruben Safir,

Staff seat board member and senior sysadmin Ian Kelling shares
his personal musings on the board process improvements, his
experience working at the Free Software Foundation (FSF), why
Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS) should get more
attention, some lessons learned from the GNU Tools Cauldron,
FSF's legal defense of GCC, and why the FSF needs
your financial support.

I recently wrote to you to update you on the FSF tech team's
work because I'm primarily a FSF tech team member, but
noticed I had more to share. I do more than just tech team work
and today I want to talk about that and explain why the FSF needs
and is worthy of your financial support.

I've been at the FSF for six and a half years now. It is a fun
and positive environment, and I feel grateful to be working
here. All of our eleven staff are doing great work, and I
have so much more I want to accomplish.

In 2021, I was elected as the staff seat to the FSF board of
Directors, for which I have volunteered since. The FSF
board is about to make it's first significant expansion of
directors in years as it draws to close a many months long
transparent nomination and evaluation process. I'm excited
about the FSF gaining more leadership, insight, and support from
its board, especially after the hundreds of hours the other board
members and I worked to modernize and improve the board
governance.

Our mission will take a long time to fully achieve it, but every
year, we see free software usage growing, often under the label
of open source. This helps us, but the open source label lacks a
guiding philosophy of why free software is essential to a
free society and in our lives.

Over the years, I've read of some people dismissing the FSF or
the idea of software freedom. Often this dismissal is based in
assumptions about the world or the FSF which don't match up with
what I see or how I understand a given situation. I try to
remember the KCD cartoon about someone being wrong on the
internet, and hope for opportunities to have a dialog with people
who have an open mind.

I am also reminded of when FSFE president Matthias Kirschner said
that as the software freedom movement grows, we will naturally
face the situation of people who care about software freedom
disagreeing about things besides free software, and when that
happens we should try to still work together, be respectful, and
not get distracted by them. I don't always agree with Matthias,
but I agree on this point. I also really enjoy the children's
book he wrote on free software, and so have the kids I've
given it to.

With this in mind, I traveled for the FSF several times, giving me the
opportunity to meet people after several years of pandemic. I went to
FOSDEM and gave a talk about Service as a Software Substitute
(SaaSS). These are services which take away control of your
computing by doing it on someone else's computer where you don't control
the software being run. Common examples include modifying a photo,
translating text into another language, or running a database. The
amount of SaaSS has been growing, and I think
partly because proprietary software is easier to explain, SaaSS hasn't
gotten enough attention. The answer to both is running free software on
a computer you control.

I also traveled to the GNU Tools Cauldron and met many wonderful
GNU developers. This conference primarily brings together
developers of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), the GNU C
Library, the GNU Debugger, and the GNU Binary
Utilities collection. It is inspiring to be amongst so many
people working successfully together on some of the most renowned
free software packages.

GCC is the compiler that serves as a great example of why copyleft
matters. It is licensed under the GNU General Public
License (GPL) version 3 or later, requiring anyone
distributing an improved version of GCC to contribute the code to
the community. LLVM is another popular free/libre compiler,
but has no such requirement and unfortunately, every free
software contribution to LLVM also becomes a proprietary
contribution to proprietary LLVM-based compilers maintained by
Apple, NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, and others, giving themselves unjust
power over the users and owners of the hardware those compilers
are made for. We need a world where our computers act in our
interests, and that means we need freedom-respecting operating
systems, especially compilers.

I spoke to some GCC developers who saw the company they work for paying
different employees to separately work on three compilers: GCC, LLVM,
and a proprietary compiler based on LLVM. It is clear to them that some
LLVM free software contributions were a way to more efficiently develop
their proprietary compiler. Companies rarely talk about why they make
these decisions. The only thing we usually see is that they made their company
website only mention or recommend using their proprietary compiler. When
people defend the companies, they don't engage on the many reasons we insist
on free software and why everyone deserves software freedom.

The situation is different, but I'm always
reminded of Big Oil's advertisements about how they are really a
super green company that plants trees, followed by leaked
documents showing they really use this messaging only to fight
against climate change activism, not to actually make change. We
live in a world of many injustices, but I cannot believe that
proprietarization is "for the best" or that this is the best we can do.

When GCC developers meet, they are focused on making the best
compiler while having the confidence that companies will
redistribute their code in ways that respect users' freedom, and
that is a wonderful thing. But, that confidence depends on the
vigilance of a small charity that is focused on the interests of
computer users: the Free Software Foundation. Not too long ago,
we faced a challenging legal threat: A company claimed that code
in GCC, in which FSF holds the copyright, was violating that
company's copyright. They demanded that we put a stop to
publishing the code under the GPL and that we inform the public
they should do the same. I looked around and it seemed that the
code in question was the only free software code in the world which
fully accomplished a certain useful task.

We do not get to publish about this work much to avoid too much
detail, and we can't name the company on the chance that
publicity could help them (I'm reminded of SCO receiving
millions of dollars from Microsoft). This company wanted to
be the gatekeeper, dictating the terms of anyone in the world who
wanted that task done. We investigated and consulted lawyers to
assist us in fighting back, and it worked, that threat is gone.
We wrote recently about our copyright handling, and this
case only enforces those points. Unlike the big tech companies,
we stand up for computer users freedom first, and support from
companies to do this kind of work is limited. The vast
majority of our funding comes from individual donors like you.

If you want the GPL and GNU to continue to stand strong for freedom
in an increasingly user-hostile world, we need your help. If every reader
of this email supports our efforts by ensuring a contribution, we can
reach our stretch goal of $425,000 and continue to defend software
freedom. If you donate $140 or more we'll send you an exclusive drawstring
bag to show off your support for user rights. The bag is black and reads
"Fight for your user rights." This is a conversation starter and a fantastic
opportunity to connect with like-minded people.

I do this work so that we may see a future in which free/libre software is the norm,
in which users control the software they use, rather than vice versa, and
we improve, study, and share the software we use together. Because everyone
deserves computer user freedom!

In freedom,

Ian Kelling

Board Member & Sysadmin