2006: The Year the FSF Reached Out To The Community

The Free Software Foundation is becoming a little better known, recently - especially with Java becoming Free Software¹. It's become a little more visible and interactive as well, even at the WSIS level - where OSI was noticeably absent. In fact, at WSIS, the FSF was one of the more visible parts of Civil Society. Granted, I don't always agree with the FSF strategies - but if there is one thing that can be said about the FSF: They are active, they are around, and they don't run from disagreement.

What caused this 'transformation'? I don't know, I'd like to think that the community had an effect. '2006: The year the FSF reached out to the community' gives a bit of background:

...John Sullivan, program administrator of the FSF, suggests that part of the reason for the change may be a more activist leadership in the FSF. Referring to people like Brown and professional activist Henri Poole, who is also an FSF director, Sullivan says, "We have a group right now that like interacting with the community, and that want the FSF to be more involved in organizing and having free software recognized outside the regular community."

Brown paraphrases an unnamed FSF staffer, saying "the FSF has historically been concerned with dealing with individual projects and maintainers, typically through Richard [Stallman]." More recently, Brown suggests, the focus has shifted away from Stallman, as some of the FSF's key issues, such as DRM, have become more mainstream and more of the FSF has had to become involved if the issues were to be addressed. "What we see right now is a lot of success for free software," Brown says. "At the same time, we also see some major threats. What we've done is respond to the strategic situation that we see. If our work is strategically more outward, more community-oriented, that's because we believe that's what we need to be doing at the moment."

Sullivan agrees. Talking about the increased media attention for some of the FSF's issues, Sullivan says, "What we've been doing is responding to that."...

It does help that there is a tad less Richard Stallman in the news this year - and with people like Lawrence Lessig and Eben Moglen being as active as they have been in their own ways, the credibility of the FSF seems more tangible.

Is the FSF global yet? It is getting there. Will that happen more in 2007? That might be nice.

¹You can call it Open Source, too, but the GPL is a Free Software License, and was before Open Source originated.
²And the annoying habit of repeating the same things over and over finally seems to be on the decline.