Posted by EditorDavid from the happy-birthday dept.
“Can you believe that we’ve been demanding user freedom since 1985?” asks a new blog post at FSF.org: Today, we’re celebrating our thirty-ninth anniversary, the “lace year,” which represents the intertwined nature and strength of our relationship with the free software community. We wouldn’t be here without you, and we are so grateful for everyone who has stood with us, advocating for a world where complete user freedom is the norm and not the exception.
As we celebrate our anniversary and reflect on the past thirty-nine years, we feel inspired by how far we’ve come, not only as a movement but as an organization, and the changes that we’ve gone through. While we inevitably have challenges ahead, we feel encouraged and eager to take them on knowing that you’ll be right there with us, working for a free future for everyone. Here’s to many more years of fighting for user freedom!
Their suggestions for celebrating include:
- Try a fully free distribution of GNU/Linux or help someone else give it a try
- Learn how to encrypt your emails and opt out of bulk surveillance
- Take a small step with big impact and swap out one nonfree program with one that’s truly free
- If you have an Android phone, download F-Droid, which is a catalogue of hundreds of free software applications
- Wish us happy birthday on social media. [Which for the FSF is Mastodon, PeerTube, and GNU social.]
- Join a Free Software Directory (FSD) meeting, which we host every Friday from 16:00 to 19:00 UTC.
- Become an associate member or gift a membership to a friend
- Donate $39 to help support free software advocacy
- Print off stickers of our 39th birthday cake
- Change your desktop background to an early-2000s-cyberspace-inspired image of our former front desk. (And then switch out your browser theme to match your new desktop background.)
And to help with the celebrations they share a free video teaching the basics of SuperCollider (the free and open source audio synthesis/algorithmic composition software). The video appears on FramaTube, an instance of the decentralized (and ActivityPub-federated) Peertube video platform, supported by the French non-profit Framasoft and powered by WebTorrent, using peer-to-peer technology to reduce load on individual servers.
Do molecular biologists wear designer genes?
Working…