Episode: 411
Title: HPR0411: Free Software Foundation Interview
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0411/hpr0411.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 19:59:05

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you.
Hi, this is Clot 2. I'm at South East Linux Festival. It's going really fantastic. I'm
talking to someone from the Free Software Foundation.
Hi, this is Deborah Nicholson.
Cool, hi Deborah. So you're here. You actually are like with the FSF, right?
Yeah, I work in the Boston office.
Cool. What do you do?
I'm a membership coordinator, so I do all the outreach around the membership program and
then all the care and tuning, make sure people get their bootable membership cards and
have their logins and everything.
So the new deal with the, when I joined it was with the, it was a little wallet size CD.
Yes.
Which shattered in my wallet.
Yeah.
The new one is really cool. It's like a plastic USB.
It's a credit card tie that fits in the wallet and it plugs in the USB drive and it boots
off at that. And it's running Gneesense, which is a 100% free operating system, no blobs.
Nice.
Yeah.
That's really cool. And I heard, and I don't know, you might know this, you might not.
And I don't even remember where I heard it.
Binary blobs in the kernel itself on some distributions.
Yeah, some versions of the kernel have binary blobs. This is running, well,
a black, and they have that black, black, black.
Yeah, right, right.
Yep.
Is D-blobbed and then that project now gone on to the Linux Libre, which has run out of South
America. So they're kind of keeping in maintaining the D-blobbed kernel.
Very cool. Okay, so that's, that, that is really neat.
And it's a really cool little thing. How much is membership anyway? I don't even know.
Oh, well, if you're a student, it's $60 a year, and if you're not a student, it's 120.
Okay.
A lot of folks opt to, opt to do that as a $10 monthly, so it's like $5 a month or $10 a month
that goes automatically, so.
And you get a really cool, like you can alias your name, your email to like an FFF email.
That's right.
Cool. So, okay, so really, I mean, aren't you guys just overdoing it? I mean, come on.
We don't, I mean, you know, free software. I mean, come on. I mean, there's a,
there's going too far, right?
In what sense? You mean that people have to use MP3 and, and dot, dot, and stuff, right?
I mean, no, they don't. Actually, they can have control of every line of code on their own
machines and still get their work done and still get the work done. There are definitely a few places
where it's sort of like, oh, that's not super ideal. Like, I, you know, I want to use, you know,
people want to use proprietary software and then that or the other place.
This past year, we celebrated the 25th anniversary of the new project. We decided to sort of,
you know, looking for like, what are the 10 or 12 things that are kind of holding people back
from being able to go with a fully free system on their machine? So, it kind of, I do
a lot of those things. You know, one of the top of the list is Gnash, which is a free flash
implementation. Yeah. We actually are supporting that one pretty heavily. Rob's the voice
doing some amazing work. Okay. Really cool. That's cool. That's cool. He's a little
handstrong and that he has to like, definitely document very, very carefully everything he does
so that it doesn't end up looking like a DMCA violation. Real bad. Like a retro entity.
Interesting. Okay. So it has to be really well documented what they're doing over there.
Some of the other stuff are like, really specific stuff like, you know, some of the,
you know, nuts and bolts things that people use with their Oracle database or like,
a mathematical or, you know, a tree skype we've been working on. Right, right.
And so the strategy is a little different for each project. For some projects, it's a matter
of letting people know like, hey, you could use a free version of this. For other ones, it's kind
of like, oh wow, we'll have to start from scratch. Right. Like, you know, most of that stuff
is not out there. And then for other things, it's just like, oh, this needs a little bit of a push
to get up to the current version and like, other gnashing is like that. Like, so, you know,
there's always a new version. Yeah, of course. So they have to keep up. They just need a little
bit of a push to be able to, you know, get to where they're on top of that. And, you know, so,
so that's, I mean, the goal is to make it even easier for people to use all of the free software
that it's out there. So, and that's what, so is FSS GNU and GNU is FSS? Or is it not the other?
The free software foundation houses the GNU project. The GNU project is like, specifically like all
of the software projects that work with the Linux kernel. I mean, they could work with other
kernels. We don't want to go there. But all of the GNU stuff is that software development.
So the free software foundation houses the GNU project. But we also do a lot of user education,
especially around issues like DRM and operating system choice. We have the GPL compliance lab
to all of the licensing work and all of that sort of thing, like, you know, all of the compliance
things that happen. That's all of the FSS. And, you know, we also, we hope Savannah, which is kind
of related to the GNU project. But it's just about non-G GNU stuff that is
GNU compliant or whatever. Exactly. And we have the free software directories that's like around
6,000 projects that we've looked at embedded and know are fully free. Cool. Well, that's, yeah,
I mean, it's really great. I mean, not only the GNU project and FSS, but I mean, the, like,
some of the side projects I really like, like, the, what is it? Bad vista. That one really
cracked me up. And the defective by design. The defective by design is one of my favorite. The yellows
are as warm as they look. Yeah. I mean, those side projects, I think those are almost
easier for a lot of people to get into. Because, I mean, because a lot of people aren't into this
too. For like, gee, what's wrong with, I don't know, you know, like these blogs that people talk
about that they don't, you know, what is that? No, no one knows. But I mean, defective by design.
I mean, that's something that people can latch on to. It's definitely been like, you know,
I mean, nothing about DRM is good, but it has been an amazing opportunity for us to have a
conversation about free software with people that we never had before. Yeah. And something that they
can relate to, like immediately. Yeah. I mean, we, you know, like I said, the GNU project is 25
years old. And for a long time, we were primarily talking to developers and fishermen. And not,
like, sort of the general computer using population, although, you know, like the general
computer using population for a while was to really just kind of very intensely, tactically
minded. Right. Yeah. That's switched. And also, you know, people are kind of wanting to
customize their systems a little bit more, a little bit more control over it. Yeah. And finding,
like, oh, it's not that, like my music device is incapable technologically of making a copy in
this format or, you know, making a copy of this many of this song. Yeah. It's that it's that I
bought and paid for a machine that I don't control. Yeah. Like that makes people kind of angry.
Yeah. Yeah. Even if they, you know, never want to crack open that machine or whatever,
and so many people kind of angry to know that they've got something, but they don't control it.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, here's, here's something I've been thinking about lately. You might,
or might not have a comment on it. The whole, you know, GNU slash Linux thing, and I'm not going
to go to the normal arguments or anything. It seems to me, like when I see the word GNU on something,
it tells me that that is quote unquote a brand of something that is truly concerned about freedom.
Yes. Capital ethics freedom. Whereas the term Linux alone doesn't necessarily guarantee that,
you know, like some systems I will get because to some devices like my in 800 that I'm recording
this on or no, I get because it says, yes, we run Linux. I'm like, cool, I like Linux. I'll get that.
But you crack it open and it's actually not like the Linux that you're not used to on computers
that you download and install the ISO of that distribution. You know, it's got something lacking.
It's got something locked out. You can't get root on your own device, things like that without
going through, you know, hurdle. Is there any value to keeping GNU rather than forcing an
association with GNU Linux, saying that GNU is more like a badge of freedom or whatever like that?
That's an interesting idea. I mean, I think like definitely our goal is computer user freedom.
If the operating system that turned out to be the best and most free for people to use,
like stopped being GNU with the Linux kernel, then we would say use whatever like, you know,
brand new, operating system, imaginary, fantastic free, yeah.
Whatever that was. We are not really interested in strategizing the specific instances. We're
interested in the overall experience or freedom. I think that, you know, I'm not entirely certain,
but I think that the idea of saying GNU slash Linux maybe if it was like the John Cougar
Mellon camp and then one day we'll drop the Cougar. I don't know.
Not even drop it. Just maintain that GNU as like, if you're going to use the term GNU,
you don't have those binary blogs maybe or you know, or you don't have the MP3 support by default,
you know, stuff like that. I don't know. I've been thinking about branding a lot lately. I don't
know why, but that's just something that occurred to me that if I see that GNU in my mind, I think
I'm going to go towards that before I'm going to go to something that doesn't even mention the
GNU thing because you're like, well, maybe they don't really care about the freedom aspect. They
just want to use this Linux thing because it's flexible and malleable and then malleable into
something completely non-free. Yeah. Well, we do definitely. I mean, it's good to know that what we
think is that GNU's answer freedom is coming through. Yeah. As to the specific ways that people
use that and like, which I don't know, you can control that. I think we can continue to, you know,
put out there that that's that GNU stands for freedom. Yeah. Yeah. You know. And if that's an
important concept, that that's something that's desirable on your desktop or your device or whatever.
Absolutely. I think, you know, we've gotten into this place where people think that you can do
some things without moral implications and then there are other places where you do things with
moral implications. Yeah. Yeah. And we just don't really live in that kind of world. Yeah.
That nothing is a null value for, you know, reverberation throughout your society that you're part of.
Yeah. Cool. And so, you know, if you choose to support proprietary software, it's not, that's not
a null value. Right. That's that. Yeah. Not totally. Well said. One more question.
And again, I don't know if, I mean, I don't know how big the FFF is. I mean, I know how big the
community is. I don't know how big the organization is. What is the general, like, who is the FFF? I mean,
I mean, are they a bunch of hippies, anarchists, business people? Like, who are these people?
Who are you all? A pretty diverse office. There's a 11 of us in the Boston office and then we have
a board of, I think it's currently five. And they're all over the US. And you guys do have a European
office or you just have an office. Well, we have a sister organization, the FFF in Europe.
But so, I mean, we are mixed of folks that are coming out from a development angle. And then,
you know, we have also like nonprofit people. Our board is a lot of academic folks like people who
teach, you know, and so it's kind of a myth. And then when you throw into that, like, all of the
people that you work on the GNU projects, like some of them work in very, you know, very corporate
environment. Right, yeah. You know, we tell T-shirts and they're like, oh, I wish I could wear one
to work, but we, you know, it's all Oxford. Right, right. And so it's a lot of different people.
And then, you know, we talk to students and they're like, oh, yeah, I don't even have to work,
yeah, to live at home and, you know, and I'm writing code and contributing to this thing.
And so we have a lot of folks like all over the place that are coming from a lot of different
directions. You know, and even politically, I would say that, you know, the way that politics
slices in the US doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't assign the, you know, the ethos are free
to offer to one particular party or another. Right. You know, so I know that we have folks that,
you know, we've got libertarians and we've got anarchists and we've got progressives and we've got,
you know, I don't even know why. Yeah. It really is a very diverse, yeah. I mean, you know,
Boston itself is a little, you know, it's fairly progressive. So like, maybe our Boston people are
a little bit more reflective of the international Boston population. Okay. Cool. That's interesting.
Okay. Well, cool. This was, that was really informative. I actually learned a lot,
I thought I knew a lot about the FSF, but that was really informative. So, uh, yeah, thanks,
Debra, for talking to me. Thank you. Okay. Thank you for listening to Haftler Public Radio.
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