Help us to continue to grow and expand the FSF licensing team.
In June I wrote a
blog post
about taking over the licensing & compliance manager role here at the
FSF. Our fundraiser last year allowed the FSF to increase our
licensing efforts, bringing us from one full time employee to two full
time employees. The past nine months have been an awesome and
gratifying experience of doing important, specialized work — work
that needs to be done and that few other organizations or individuals
are doing.
Today is the last day of this year's frundraiser, and it is with my
pleasure to share with you a bit of what we did in 2012 and why
it matters for 2013. I hope that if you believe that what we are
doing is important, you will find ways of supporting and furthering
the efforts of the FSF Licensing & Compliance Lab so that we can
continue to grow and to do more.
Please help us reach our remaining fundraising goal of signing up 120
new associate members before the end of January. If you are already a
member, please consider signing up a friend.
Compliance investigations and backlog reduction
What we did in 2012
We responded and resolved over 400 reports of suspected license
violations and over 600 general licensing and compliance questions.
Why it matters for 2013
The obvious benefit of a reducing our backlog of requests and emails
is that it gives us more time to focus on doing more of our other
work, such as being able to more ambitiously pursue our licensing
compliance cases, or to put more time and effort into working with
groups such as Creative Commons whom we have been providing advice and
feedback in their drafting of the CC 4.0 set of licenses.
But, another less obvious benefit is that in dealing with hundreds of
requests, Donald and I gained a ton of confidence, knowledge, and
experience in a relatively short period of time.
So, while Donald and I may not yet have the same degree of
Ninja skills as our predecessor,
the fact is that the FSF now has two trained mercenary
warriors licensing and compliance experts to unleash upon the
world in 2013!
Launched Respects Your Freedom hardware certification program
What we did in 2012
In October, we
awarded
our first Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification to the LulzBot
AO-100 3D Printer sold by Aleph Objects, Inc.
Why it matters for 2013
In order to award our first RYF certification to a hardware product,
we had to accomplish a lot of other firsts, including:
creating a logo/certification mark, certification lab and (re)certification process and negotiating a contract.
Having solved many problems and cleared many a hurdle, we will now be
able to focus our efforts on improving our existing marketing and
educational materials on our RYF certification program, reaching out
to new and strengthening our existing relationships with hardware makers,
and, hopefully certifying more products.
Organizing and improving our educational licensing materials
What we did in 2012
The GNU Project and the FSF have produced a tremendous amount of
educational materials on
free licensing over the past 27 years. For example, the
GNU Licenses FAQ page
alone is over 40 pages long. This material is of immense value
to the public. This year, we spent a fair amount of time sorting through our
materials, determining on how to improve and better organize them, and
figuring out what new materials should be created.
Why it matters for 2013
Year after year we have seen a steady increase in the number of people producing, sharing, using, and relying upon free
software. Governments, schools, developers, and hundreds of millions
of users around the world are using free software. This increased
interest, usage, and participation brings with it a lot of people wanting
to learn more, discovering new problems, and looking for
answers. Licensing is one area where we want to make sure that our
answers to those questions and the materials we provide are both
accurate and easy to find. We must curate and improve our educational resources, because they are an invaluable resource to the world.
How you can help
I have shared with you some of the important work that the Licensing &
Compliance Lab will be doing this year. In order to accomplish this
work and the many other goals we have set for ourselves, we need your
support.
If you are interested in becoming a licensing volunteer for the FSF,
please mailto:licensing@fsf.org — we'd love your
help!
