Thirty-five years after the founding of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), its mission is more important than ever, and the organization has grown to fill that need, with multiple departments attending to crucial education, advocacy, and enforcement. Our Campaigns Team sounds the alarm about freedom-restricting developments and creates educational materials to bring more free software advocates to the movement. Our Licensing and Compliance Lab defends the GNU General Public License (GPL) and the thousands of programs distributed under its terms, and is actively building a future in which we can direct people to ethical hardware of any kind through the Respects Your Freedom (RYF) program.

Free software is first and foremost about ethical principles. But we also want everyone to be able to actually live in freedom, and to demonstrate the way free software can be technically excellent. This work is supported by our talented Tech Team, who provide dedicated "bare metal" and virtual machines for the daily operations of the GNU Project and other free software communities, including Web hosting, mailing lists, software repositories, and compiling and testing software packages. The FSF Tech Team is also building a free collaboration site, which will assist free software projects and developers with being able to share their code, as always, in full freedom.

We are so grateful for our community, who have stood with the FSF to demand change for the past thirty-five years. And as we celebrate the FSF's birthday week, we reflect upon the changes that we are all fighting for. Change is necessary, because people view and experience the world through technology, and that view is obstructed by the lens that proprietary software corporations try to force us to look through.

We couldn't let thirty-five years of free software accomplishments pass without a celebration with, and for, the community that has made this happen. Traditionally, we would celebrate such a milestone in person, but for this exceptional coral anniversary of the FSF, we had to get creative.

Birthday event program for Friday, October 9th

This Friday, October 9th, from 12:00 EDT (16:00 UTC) until 17:00 (21:00 UTC), we will host a fun and informative live event with guests from all over the world, to discuss the future of free software and learn from their experiences in different fields driving free software forward. You can find the full program on the FSF Web site, but here are some of the highlights we are looking forward to:

• We invited illustrator and artist David Revoy, who also designed our beautiful coral anniversary artwork, to join us and talk about his artwork, the challenges of design in free software, and his work with Pepper & Carrot. You can join us in the IRC #fsf channel on Freenode to ask him questions as well!

• We count on federated social media to keep developing our ethical social experience online, so we asked Pouhiou, co-director of Framasoft, to have a conversation with us about what a program like video sharing platform Peertube can mean for the future, and the importance and challenges of moderating a server.

• We will also be joined by Eda Nano, board member at April in France, who can elaborate on developments of free software in France, and talk about collaboration between organizations.

• A segment focusing on the challenges and successes of local free software activism worldwide will welcome organizers from free software groups large and small, including long-time LibrePlanet speaker Italo Vignoli from The Document Foundation, located in Italy, and Bonnie Mehring, Free Software Foundation Europe's junior project manager.

• Also, be sure to join us for short talks from FSF president Geoffrey Knauth, executive director John Sullivan, and FSF founder Richard Stallman on the last thirty-five years of software freedom, and what the future holds for the FSF.

It is promising to be a fun, educational, and entertaining event. You can join us via fsf.org, and join the conversation with our speakers live through IRC on Freenode in the #fsf channel; we'll make sure we put the link up prominently on our homepage as well. You can also join the online experience by sending in your own video commemorating the occasion, following the instructions on the LibrePlanet wiki.

This birthday celebration is gratis, and all of our speakers are volunteering their time to create a joyous event where we can share our experiences and knowledge together. The LibrePlanet safe space policy will be followed throughout the event, so please make sure you read it. If this online experience is anything like LibrePlanet 2020, we will have a wonderful event, and we can't wait to see everyone online.

Support the FSF and get an anniversary pin

If you can, please support our work for this celebration. With your help, we can effect major change! You can show your support for the future of free software by donating $35 or more to the FSF during this birthday week to get a free anniversary pin (while stocks last). You can also support free software by purchasing David's magnificent design on a T-shirt or poster through the GNU Press Shop.

We hope to see you this Friday, October 9th, to help us celebrate!

Illustration Copyright © 2020 Free Software Foundation, Inc., by David Revoy, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

For the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) thirty-fifth birthday, we collaborated with free culture illustrator David Revoy to create a marvelous design, and we think you'll like the results.

Behold the FSF thirty-fifth anniversary graphic:

It's wonderful, but what is it? The undersea architecture of the future, of course! We looked up traditional thirty-fifth anniversary gifts, and learned that the thirty-fifth is our "coral anniversary."

This is auspicious: the more we considered coral -- particularly Scleractinia, the reef-forming "stony corals" -- the more similarities to the free software ethos became apparent. In a coral reef, countless individuals of diverse species band together and share resources to collectively create the framework for an ecosystem of dazzling diversity. The free software movement is similar, being a large group of individuals collaborating to advance human freedom and an array of related ethical goals.

A reef is home to thousands upon thousands of different species of fish, cnidarians, molluscs, crustaceans, and more, all built on the bedrock infrastructure of the coral. Sound familiar? Colonies of coral share resources by circulating food and water between individuals; they can split apart collectively or individually to go separate ways, or multiple colonies can join together in cooperation. Humans stand to learn much from coral -- lessons already embodied in the free software movement.

As we consider what we can learn from coral, it's apparent that we are responsible to give something back. Coral reef ecosystems, much like free software, are under severe threat all around the world.

Get the design on a T-shirt or poster through the shop

By becoming an FSF associate member, you will be a vital part of the free software ecosystem, one which helps continue to create a world where all software respects our freedom and dignity. Of course, as one of the benefits, you receive a 20% discount at the GNU Press Shop, which will come in handy when you are so impressed with this design, you decide that you would love it on a T-shirt or a 18 x 24" poster.

The items are available now at the GNU Press Shop. We have limited quantities, so get yours before they sell out!

Happy thirty-five years of FSF!

Matt Lavallee
Operations Assistant

Illustration Copyright © 2020 Free Software Foundation, Inc., by David Revoy, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Today, on October 4th, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) celebrates its thirty-fifth year of fighting for software freedom. Our work will not be finished until every computer user is able to do all of their digital tasks in complete freedom -- whether that's on a desktop, laptop, or the computer in your pocket. The fight for free software continues, and we wouldn't be here without you.

To celebrate, we have a full week of announcements and surprises planned starting today, and we will end in an online anniversary event featuring both live and prerecorded segments this Friday, October 9th, from 12:00 EDT (16:00 UTC) until 17:00 EDT (21:00 UTC). We'd love for you to join in celebration of this amazing community by submitting a short (two-minute) video sharing your favorite memory about free software or the FSF, and a wish for the future of software freedom. We'll be collecting the videos all week and airing a selection during the birthday event on October 9th. Please follow the instructions linked below on how to successfully (and freely!) submit the video via FTP.

If you are able to, please make a donation of $35 or more to help keep the fight for user freedom going another 35 years, we'll send you a commemorative pin as pictured in this blog post.

Uploading a video

We'd love to have you submit a video for us to show during this week's festivities. Please follow the instructions we've posted to the LibrePlanet wiki to upload your video, and write to us at campaigns@fsf.org when you're finished. Please keep your comments on the topic of free software and the FSF, and your video length under two minutes.

There's no better way to commemorate the FSF's 35th anniversary than to spread the free software message. We've come up with a few more ways you can do so, and ideally encourage your friends to do the same. The best gifts we can ask for are the individual contributions that keep this movement going.

Ways to celebrate

• Try a fully free distribution of GNU/Linux, which can be run "live" without making any permanent changes to your computer's hard drive.

• Take an hour to follow our Email Self-Defense Guide guide, and learn how to opt out of bulk surveillance.

• Download and experiment with one of the oldest parts of the GNU operating system, the GNU Emacs text editor. Try the tutorial by launching the editor and typing Ctrl-h + t (C-h t), or see if you can make it through some of the games included with Emacs, such as Alt-x (M-x) dunnet or M-x tetris.

• Make the commitment to replace one nonfree program that you use with one that respects your freedom, such as using LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office.

• Petition the administrators of your favorite Web site to free the proprietary JavaScript lurking on their page that many users run and download without ever realizing it.

• Contribute to the Free Software Directory by writing or updating the entry for a freely licensed program you enjoy, or join us on the Freenode IRC channel #fsf Fridays from 16:00-19:00 UTC for our weekly meetings on how to improve the Directory.

• Help support the FSF's important work by buying manuals, apparel, and other GNU gear at the GNU Press shop! You could upgrade your skills with a GNU/Linux command line manual, or just get an adorable stuffed baby GNU as a companion for late-night hacking. Also, keep your eyes peeled for special items related to our 35th anniversary. The pin you see here is just one of them!

• Watch and share the videos from our animated series, as well as the keynotes, presentations, and panels given at LibrePlanet, the annual conference dedicated to defending computer user freedom.

• Have an Android phone? Install F-Droid, a repository with hundreds of fun and useful free software apps.

• Share a message on social media about the FSF's thirty-fifth anniversary! Feel free to adapt the text and use it with the #fsf35 hashtag and the included image.

Join me in celebrating #fsf35 with the free software community and the @FSF this Friday, October 9th by tuning into fsf.org for the live anniversary event.

We're another year older, but that doesn't mean we're slowing down our efforts to bring software freedom to users around the globe. Stay tuned for more information on how we plan to ring in the FSF's next year, and the vital role each one of us plays in ensuring free software's success for the future. We hope that you'll be able to take part in our festivities this week!