The FSF was incorporated in Boston, Massachusetts, US, where it is also based.
From its founding until the mid-1990s, FSF's funds were mostly used to employ software developers to write free software for the GNU Project. Since the mid-1990s, the FSF's employees and volunteers have mostly worked on legal and structural issues for the free software movement and the free software community.
Consistent with its goals, the FSF aims to use only free software on its own computers.
The Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985 as a non-profit corporation supporting free software development.
It continued existing GNU projects such as the sale of manuals and tapes, and employed developers of the free software system. Since then, it has continued these activities, as well as advocating for the free software movement. The FSF is also the steward of several free software licences, meaning it publishes them and has the ability to make revisions as needed.
The FSF holds the copyrights on many pieces of the GNU system, such as GNU Compiler Collection. As holder of these copyrights, it has the authority to enforce the copyleft requirements of the GNU General Public License (GPL) when copyright infringement occurs on that software.
More information: FSF
From 1991 until 2001, GPL enforcement was done informally, usually by Stallman himself, often with assistance from FSF's lawyer, Eben Moglen. Typically, GPL violations during this time were cleared up by short email exchanges between Stallman and the violator. In the interest of promoting copyleft assertiveness by software companies to the level that the FSF was already doing, in 2004 Harald Welte launched gpl-violations.org.
In late 2001, Bradley M. Kuhn (then executive director), with the assistance of Moglen, David Turner, and Peter T. Brown, formalized these efforts into FSF's GPL Compliance Labs.
From 2002 to 2004, high-profile GPL enforcement cases, such as those against Linksys and OpenTV, became frequent.
GPL enforcement and educational campaigns on GPL compliance was a major focus of the FSF's efforts during this period.
In March 2003, SCO filed suit against IBM alleging that IBM's contributions to various free software, including FSF's GNU, violated SCO's rights. While FSF was never a party to the lawsuit, FSF was subpoenaed on November 5, 2003.
From 2003 to 2005, FSF held legal seminars to explain the GPL and the surrounding law. Usually taught by Bradley M. Kuhn and Daniel Ravicher, these seminars offered CLE credit and were the first effort to give formal legal education on the GPL.
In 2007, the FSF published the third version of the GNU General Public License after significant outside input.
In December 2008, FSF filed a lawsuit against Cisco for using GPL-licensed components shipped with Linksys products. Cisco was notified of the licensing issue in 2003, but Cisco repeatedly disregarded its obligations under the GPL.
In May 2009, FSF dropped the lawsuit when Cisco agreed to make a monetary donation to the FSF and appoint a Free Software Director to conduct continuous reviews of the company's licence compliance practices.
In September 2019, Richard Stallman resigned as president of the FSF after pressure from journalists and members of the open-source community in response to him making controversial comments in defence of then-deceased Marvin Minsky on Jeffrey Epstein's sex-trafficking scandal. Nevertheless, Stallman remained head of the GNU Project and in 2021, he returned to the FSF board of directors.
More information: FSFE
The FSF maintains a list of high-priority projects to which the Foundation claims that there is a vital need to draw the free software community's attention. The FSF considers these projects important because computer users are continually being seduced into using non-free software, because there is no adequate free replacement.
As of 2021, high-priority tasks include reverse engineering proprietary firmware; reversible debugging in GNU Debugger; developing automatic transcription and video editing software, Coreboot, drivers for network routers, a free smartphone operating system and creating replacements for Skype and Siri.
Previous projects highlighted as needing work included the Free Java implementations, GNU Classpath, and GNU Compiler for Java, which ensure compatibility for the Java part of OpenOffice.org, and the GNOME desktop environment.
More information: GNU
when authors frequently copied other authors
at length in works of non-fiction.
Richard Stallman
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