The FSF receives thousands of licensing questions a year from free software users and developers. The staff on the FSF Compliance Lab would not be able to handle all these requests on their own. That is why we are so grateful to our volunteers who assist us in our efforts. Volunteers are one of the most important resources an organization can muster.

The license volunteers are an amazing group of people, but they are often working behind the scenes. With all the hard work they do, they really deserve some time in the spotlight. That is why this installment of our licensing resource series is focusing on the Compliance Lab Team. Here you can find out a little bit more about the volunteers, their backgrounds, and areas of interest. These volunteers assist in handling free software licensing questions submitted by the public to licensing@fsf.org. Volunteers also review licensing publications and aid in keeping our educational materials relevant. In addition, volunteers collaborate in investigating alleged GNU General Public License (GPL) violations reported to license-violation@gnu.org. We wanted to take a moment to publicly thank our volunteers and share their work with the rest of the world.

If you're interested in becoming a licensing volunteer just write to licensing@fsf.org and tell us a bit about your background, both legal and within the free software world. Please also take the GPL quiz and let us know how you did. Once accepted, and suitably trained, volunteers join the team and are on the front line answering free software questions from the public.

We hope you take a chance to meet our volunteers, and possibly consider joining the team. But even if you're not ready to be a licensing wizard, there's plenty of other ways to help. Here's what you can do:

• You can keep up to date on this series and more free software news by subscribing to our newsletter, the Free Software Supporter and subscribing to our RSS feed.

• You can help fund our work in creating these licensing resources by becoming a member or by making a donation.

Enjoy this article? Check out our previous entry in Licensing resource series: The most popular resources for 2016