The beginning of a new year invests us with new hope for the future: while the free software movement has been dealt some harsh blows in 2018, here at the Free Software Foundation (FSF) we have a lot of reasons for optimism as well.

The public is slowly becoming aware that Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and other purveyors of proprietary software don’t have their best interests at heart, that “smart home” appliances are an unwise buy, and that allowing bulk surveillance in the name of “security” isn’t worth the loss of freedom. The less people outside of the inner circle of tech trust the peddlers of nonfree software and related products, the more open they are to our message; the more the public fights back to defend net neutrality, smash the disastrous EU Copyright Directive Article 13, and demand answers about how social media giants are violating their privacy, the broader our potential audience grows.

In order to create the free world we need, free software must become a "kitchen table" issue. Making that happen is a large part of the FSF’s mission, and it takes the everyday advocacy and hard work of a huge community of supporters to make it possible. It also takes funds for campaigns, software development, and more -- freedom isn’t always gratis, unfortunately. So we’re making one last push to ask you to help us start 2019 in a position of strength.

Our members provide the most crucial building blocks for our movement, and member dues fuel the infrastructure of the FSF and the GNU Project, keep the GNU Press churning out important free software documentation and cool T-shirts, enables the enforcement of copyleft licenses, and so much more. We urge you to start off your new year by becoming a new member of the FSF. Benefits of FSF membership include a 20% discount on FSF merchandise, gratis entrance to the yearly LibrePlanet conference, and more -- plus, as a thank-you gift, we’re sending all new and renewing associate members a fun set of exclusive enamel pins! We're just shy of our goal of 400 new members in this fundraiser period, and with your help, we'll start off 2019 ready to launch software freedom to new frontiers.

In the meantime, the FSF is bigger and better than ever, and more equipped to do the work you count on us to do: standing up against companies, governments, and programs that abuse your computing freedom, and expanding your ability to replace nonfree programs with free software that meets all of your computing needs. Keep an eye on our blogs, our news page, and our GNU Social, Diaspora, and Twitter accounts for the latest news. With your help, we can make this the best year for free software yet.

When I look back on 2018, of course I see successes for user freedom across the world: the appeal in Christoph Hellwig's GPL compliance case against VMWare is moving forward; Google employees are rallying against Dragonfly, the authoritarian search engine being built for the Chinese government; the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) home state of Massachusetts is taking steps for the Right to Repair; and people all over the world shared their tips and tricks to leading safer digital lives -- just to name a few! It's hard not to be impressed and inspired by everything the free software -- and greater digital rights -- community has done so much over the past year.

But the work we need to do for freedom is far from over. I want to highlight just a few of the (many) losses from 2018. I think these make it clear why the work of organizations like the FSF is so important. The FSF sets a hard line for freedom -- uncompromising in our ideology and bringing it to everything we do. I look at this list and am reminded why the FSF exists, why we need to keep fighting, and why we can only succeed by rallying as a community.

Project Dragonfly

Dragonfly, mentioned above, is a censored search engine Google is likely building for use in China. It is a travesty for the future of software freedom in China. It is explicitly designed to allow censorship of the Web and Web access.

Project Dragonfly was "effectively ended" in mid-December, after five months of hard efforts by Google staff, journalists, and activists around the world. This is a great success, and should be celebrated, but Dragonfly never should have existed in the first place. We have no doubt that someone will try this again, with or without Google.

What does this mean for free software? Projects like Dragonfly allow greater targeting of tools used to create, maintain, share, and use free software. We know from experience that the Chinese government will use this power to block access to important free software, especially in the categories of cryptography and security. It is possible that users would not even be able to learn about free software.

On the note of censorship...

The European Copyright Directive and Censorship Machines

Activists and activist organizations in the European Union use the term "Censorship Machines" for the upload filters the European Copyright Directive will require sites to install. These attempts to "prevent copyright infringement" only serve to stifle creativity and software freedom. You can read more at juliareda.eu.

While a first round of voting saw the proposed Copyright Directive rejected, it later passed onto next steps, bringing us closer to a more controlled, more dystopian Internet and Web.

What does this mean for free software? One of the themes from 2018 is greater government and corporate control over what we can access on the Web and how we interact with the Internet. According to the Free Software Foundation Europe, Article 13 "imposes preventive blocking of online code repositories."

Net neutrality, the FCC, and the ongoing battle for freedom on the Net

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to gut net neutrality protections in the United States. In the US, Title II is a provision that treated Internet Service Providers (ISPs) as "common carriers," or organizations that are required to provide "general service to the public without discrimination." This is the closest thing the US had to providing net neutrality.

In 2018, the US Congress created a discharge petition to overturn the FCC's ruling. As of writing this, the House of Representatives is waiting to vote on the petition.

What does this mean for free software? This is a twist on how Article 13 affects us, with the government allowing corporate control over what we see and do on the Internet. With net neutrality protections gone, ISPs can (and will) throttle access to Web sites and users that aren't able to pay extra fees. This will impact smaller Web sites, including code sharing sites and other tools we use to build and share free software. It will give major DRM-ed Web sites a privileged status, as they will be the ones able to pay extra fees, and they already have good relationships with the ISPs.

Oracle, Inc. v. Google, Inc.

In the words of Parker Higgins, "you wouldn't reimplement an API." The US Federal Circuit agrees.

The Oracle v. Google case concerning the copyright of Java APIs, originally from 2010, continues to this day. After years of back and forth, 2016 brought good news: a jury found Google’s reimplementation of Oracle’s Java APIs to be fair use and therefore acceptable. However, Oracle appealed, and this year the Federal Circuit ruled in favor of Oracle, finding Google’s use of the Java APIs to be copyright infringement.

Read the FSF's 2012 and 2014 statements on the matter.

What does this mean for free software? This ruling is a big loss for interoperability in software. With the recent results of this case, and the potential for large penalties due to copyright infringement, developing free software through API compatibility could become a legally risky activity. This ruling could fundamentally alter the standard software practice of interoperability through APIs.

Licensing and the Commons Clause

I'd be remiss to not mention one of the most contentious licensing debates in recent history: the Commons Clause.

The Commons Clause isn't a license per se, but something to add to a pre-existing license. Released towards the end of 2018 by Redis, the misleadingly named Commons Clause is a non-commercial use clause, and using it renders a previously free license nonfree.

What does this mean for free software? This is a risk to user freedom, as it makes a free license into a nonfree one. It does not guarantee the four freedoms of free software, and it does not respect user (or developer) rights. Not only does the Commons Clause set a precedent that a free license can be contorted into a nonfree one, it could potentially confuse people looking to use free software.

In summary...

These are just a few of the setbacks software freedom took in 2018. Each one reminds me why I do what I do at the FSF every day -- stand up for user rights by standing up for software freedom. I hope you'll look at this list and not feel despondent. Instead, I ask you to look at it as a to-do list for 2019 -- seeing where and how we can do better, what controversies are on the horizon, and how we can keep working together for a freer world. If you want to support the work of the FSF in 2019, please consider becoming a member.

I started this by mentioning a few of the successes we saw in 2018. These aren't the only ones! Read more about the small victories of 2018 here.

At a brief glance, 2018 might seem like a big old bummer when it comes to the fight for software freedom: the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to dismantle net neutrality regulations, Facebook continued to abuse public trust, and the European Union passed the disastrous Article 13, which threatens free speech and free software. Plus, smartphones and other computers are thoroughly infested with spyware, Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), and other creepy crawlies, and we don’t even have to tell you how sinister the Internet of Things is -- don’t invite Alexa, Echo, Google Home, Nest, or any of those other invaders into your house!

The wins for 2018 haven’t made headlines in the same way as all of these items, but they reflect some important trends: greater public awareness of the importance of controlling the technology we use, and greater awareness of how to fight back. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) works hard every day for wins like these, and in this article, we're sharing some of the progress the digital rights community has made.

Major donations

As you may have already heard, the FSF received two wonderful, enormous monetary gifts this year: 91.45 Bitcoin (valued at $1 million) from the Pineapple Fund, and another $1 million from Handshake. We weren’t alone in this windfall: other great organizations who got big donations included Software Freedom Conservancy, the Internet Archive, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

This influx of funds don’t just keep the lights on and improve our ability to communicate the importance of free software: they expand what we can actually do to bring more free software into existence, improve the free software that exists, and support the development of free software that replaces proprietary software that people depend on every day. The Handshake donation, in particular, includes funds earmarked for GNU Guix and GuixSD, GNU Octave, the GNU Toolchain, the fight against nonfree JavaScript, and Replicant, the fully free mobile operating system based on Android.

This doesn't mean that everyday members and donors are any less important: we can't count on huge windfalls every year, and the steady support provided by associate members is priceless for our stability. Thousands of people who care about software freedom donate less than $200 a year on average to support the work we do, so every individual at any amount makes an important contribution. If you're not a member already, we encourage you to join today, and if you're already a member, tell your friends why they should join too!

Microsoft joins the Open Invention Network

Just to be clear, Microsoft has a very long way to go to earn the free software movement's trust. However, we were pleased to hear that they’re starting to pay some attention to our calls to cease their use of computational idea patents to aggressively intimidate free software developers, distributors, and users. The announcement that they’ve joined both the LOT Network and the Open Invention Network (OIN) was an excellent first step -- but not one we’re going to settle for, either. You can read the rest of our statement here.

LibreJS: GNU and improved

As we pointed out in the Fall 2018 Free Software Bulletin, JavaScript is almost impossible to escape on the Internet, and when you open a page with JavaScript on it, it will run automatically. Nonfree JavaScript includes many of the standard abuses that come with proprietary software: for instance, it can be used to identify and profile you. A JavaScript blocker allows you to browse the Web without nonfree JavaScript running willy-nilly in the background and doing who knows what without your permission, so we’ve made GNU LibreJS a high priority. The new version of LibreJS, funded by the FSF, loads pages faster, does not require a browser restart to enable and disable the plugin, and is compatible with WebExtensions, and thus newer Mozilla-based browsers, including Abrowser and a future version of IceCat.

Of course, there’s way more to do before we can call the issue of proprietary JavaScript solved: for instance, you lose a lot of Web functionality if you block JavaScript, and some sites don't even work at all, so we need to get Web site owners to stop using nonfree JavaScript, period. Check out the Bulletin article for some more ways to take action on this issue!

ActivityPub becomes a W3C recommended standard

While we do not recommend the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as a place to do standards work since they sold out to proprietary corporate interests and betrayed your freedom by adopting the Encrypted Media Extensions standard for Digital Restriction Management (DRM), it’s nevertheless cause for celebration that the group of community experts working on the standard brought their work to the completion, leading to the W3C recommending ActivityPub this past January.

ActivityPub is a protocol for building decentralized social networking applications. Decentralized free software social networks are becoming increasingly popular, and we maintain accounts on GNU social and Diaspora, but most of these networks can’t talk to each other, keeping them from having the popular reach of, say, Twitter. ActivityPub “gives applications a shared vocabulary that they can use to communicate with each other,” enabling users of a social network that implements ActivityPub to communicate beyond the individual instance of, say, Mastodon. It connects multiple social networks to create one monster, federated network, sans the abuses of Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. This is a terrific first step to freeing users from the proprietary software requirements and SaaSS functions of commonly used social media, and we hope to see more exciting developments soon.

Slow but positive progress on DRM

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) creates legal penalties for trying to break the DRM on the products you own -- a major violation of your user freedom. The process of applying for exemptions is a Kafkaesque mess, but many of the exemptions we supported were granted in the latest round, which will at least stop some malicious prosecution while we work to abolish the restrictions entirely. For instance, the rules for permitting researchers to access the software on devices have been loosened, so that researchers who are just trying to determine how badly a product violates your privacy won’t be risking DMCA charges.

In the meantime, while DRM is imposed in items from baby monitors to medical devices, some clever and brave hackers and developers have discovered roundabout ways to seize control of these items. In the case of the Sleepyhead software program, which lets the users of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machines access the data the machine generates in order to improve their results, these efforts may even be saving lives, and we’re always glad when a news story breaks that brings more attention to the injustice and insanity of outlawing this kind of extremely beneficial tinkering.

Tech workers get active

No matter how brilliant the people at the reins of a tech company are, it takes thousands of other people’s work and ingenuity to create the products, services, and software we use every day -- which means that if tech workers were to, say, refuse to build nonfree software, our battle would be won. They aren’t taking this particular stand in large numbers just yet, but tech workers are developing a habit lately of taking stands on other matters: for instance, Google employees demanded answers about the company’s plan to build "Dragonfly," a censored version of their search engine for China (followed by a demand to cancel the initiative, signed by 14 human rights organizations). Between public outrage and threats of a strike, Google backed down, and the Dragonfly project is now "effectively ended."

We find it heartening to see the people who build software exercising their conscience and refusing to be responsible for evil software, and we encourage you to stand up against all software that controls you, including what you’re allowed to see, say, and download. Along with activism for net neutrality, against DRM, against Article 13 in Europe, and for the right to repair, it can only be a positive thing when the community demands more control over technology, and we hope that this activist energy will translate into more wins for free software as well.

In the meantime, here at the FSF, we'll be making sure you hear about every opportunity to stand up against companies, governments, and programs that abuse your computing freedom, and letting you know what free software options exist to serve your computing needs. Although the outlook may look grim on the surface, lots of important and hopeful trends are bubbling beneath the surface, and we can't wait to see what happens next. Keep an eye on these blogs, our news page, and our GNU social, Diaspora, and Twitter accounts for the latest news!

A little over six years ago, the GNU Guix project was announced. Since that first email, the project and the community gathering around Guix have grown steadily.

Around 265 people have collectively contributed tens of thousands of commits to the project. In the past year alone, we have received close to 11,000 commits. More than 8,700 packages are now available, and Guix is supported on five different CPU architectures. Guix has made inroads in the field of scientific computing, and we have been able to secure institutional support for parts of our build farm providing binary substitutes to users. As a welcoming community, you have spent countless hours introducing Guix to new users, to help them when they experienced bugs, and to remove those bugs from Guix.

In addition to all of that, your generous financial contributions in the past year have been instrumental in bootstrapping and maintaining our new build new farm, for which we experimented with hardware that has been stripped of Intel's Management Engine, and which is running Libreboot instead of a proprietary BIOS. While it turned out to be not quite as simple as we had expected, we have learned valuable lessons from this experience. Your contributions have also paid for server hosting fees, for hardware replacement and maintenance costs, and for additional ARM build hosts.

For all this: thank you very much!

Reflecting on the past year's successes and missteps, we (the maintainers) have come up with ideas for the coming year that will need your support.

• We want to better support users of non-Intel hardware. This will necessitate growing our distributed build farm. Currently, professional server hosting fees are an ongoing monthly cost, and this will also be the case in 2019. With additional servers and build hosts in data centers across the globe, your donations could help pay for these increasing costs.

• As powerful ARM-based server hardware becomes more affordable, we would like to extend our build farm to more quickly provide binary substitutes for users of low-power ARM hardware. We are looking into buying at least one Softiron Overdrive 3000 rack server to build packages for both armhf and aarch64.

• We would like to increase our efforts to welcome more people from communities that are currently underrepresented in tech into the circle of Guix contributors. To that end, we want to continue to participate in Outreachy, a successful internship program for applicants from underrepresented backgrounds. Your contributions could help us pay for the stipends that would be paid to interns working on Guix-related projects for three months.

• Past experience has shown that regular in-person meetings are often very productive and beneficial to the community. In the past, we have sometimes piggy-backed on other meetings, but we think that it is worth organizing independent meetups and hack sessions. In 2019, we could use additional funds to pay for expenses relating to such meetings.

The Guix project was very lucky to receive a large donation from Handshake a few weeks ago. Unexpected funding like this can certainly accelerate the realization of some of our planned activities in the short term. However, the continued support of donors like yourself remains crucial to cover recurring expenses in the long term, to ensure the project's financial stability, and to allow us to plan ahead with confidence.

Can you match our average contribution of $110 (not counting the large gift we just received)? We appreciate any size donation you can make at https://my.fsf.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=50. We can also accept contributions by wire transfer in USD, Euro, and GBP -- for that, please write to donate@fsf.org asking for the account details. If you can contribute $500 or more, you'll receive a special public "Thank GNU" appreciation from the FSF.

Thank you!

P.S. The FSF is also currently holding its major fundraiser of the year. 10% of donations for GNU Guix go to the FSF to help sustain the services they provide for us -- please help to get the word out!

We are currently running a fundraising drive to launch free software to new frontiers. Would you consider supporting the work of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and Licensing and Compliance team by becoming a member or making a donation today?

I am the current licensing and compliance manager for the FSF, though I've had several roles in my time here. The Lab handles all the free software licensing work for the FSF. Copyleft is the best legal tool we have for protecting the rights of users, and the Lab makes sure that tool is at full power by providing fundamental licensing education. From publishing articles and resources on free software licensing, to doing license compliance work for the GNU Project, to handling our certification programs like Respects Your Freedom, if there is a license involved, the Lab is on the case.

When I started working at the FSF part-time in 2008, the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPLv3) was only a year old. Our Respects Your Freedom certification program didn't yet exist. The Free Software Directory wasn't yet a wiki that could be updated by the community at large. Things have changed a lot over the years, as has our ability to help users to understand and share freely licensed works. I'd like to take just a moment as 2018 draws to a close to look back on some of the great work we accomplished.

While the GPLv3 celebrated its tenth anniversary last year, there still remains a lot to be done in helping developers understand how to best use it and other GNU licenses. The Licensing and Compliance Lab, along with a team of volunteers, has for many years answered questions from the community. This year, we were delighted for Jake Glass to join the team as an intern, and are grateful for his help in improving licensing materials as well as answering questions from the community. The world of free software has grown so much over the past decade that we want to help make it as easy as possible to use free software and track the licenses in projects. Many organizations are developing tools to help tackle this issue, such as the Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX). But these tools are only useful if they are accurate and support best practices. Looking to improve the situation, we worked together with SPDX to make sure that their identifiers correctly reflected the licensing choices of developers. In 2018, we were happy to announce that SPDX updated their identifiers to differentiate between choosing only a specific version of a GNU license versus that version or any later version (e.g. GPLv3-only or GPLv3-or-any-later-version). This is just one example of our ongoing work interfacing with other organizations and projects in order to improve the culture of free software licensing for everyone.

This year also saw more growth in our Respects Your Freedom certification program. This program helps users to find hardware devices they can trust to respect their freedom and privacy. We were excited to add another laptop/tablet hybrid with the Minifree Libreboot X200 Tablet. While we have previously certified many Librebooted laptops, 2018 was the year we finally certified a device to help you Libreboot your own device: the Zerocat Chipflasher Board Edition 1. While we celebrate reaching thirty total certified devices, we are looking forward to even more exciting additions in the future, with over fifty devices currently working their way through certification. Watching this important program grow so fast from the beginning has been incredibly rewarding.

2018 also saw the return of our Continuing Legal Education seminars. While executive director John Sullivan and I give many licensing talks at conferences throughout the year geared towards a more general audience, these seminars are sessions meant for legal professionals and interested licensing geeks to dive deeply into their understanding of the GPL and to help people understand how the Principles of Community Oriented GPL Enforcement work. It's an opportunity to teach the law and history of free software, as well as to connect with legal practitioners from around the world. The last seminar prior to this was over four years ago, so we were long overdue to run another. Looking to the future, we plan on making these seminars a more regular occurrence.

The Free Software Directory saw a major milestone in the past year, surpassing 16,000 listed packages. We were also aided by the tech team interns, David Hedlund and Sonali Singhal. David is a long-time Directory volunteer who exemplifies the way that program grew and developed over the past decade. David long ago took a leadership role in updating and improving the Directory, and we were grateful that he was able to take a role as an intern to extend that work even further. Sonali was an Outreachy intern who was able to upgrade the software running the Directory itself. This important work helps keep the Directory running while putting us in a great place for the future. However, while we celebrate the accomplishments of this year, there's clearly a lot more work to be done in order to ensure that the Free Software Directory truly lists every free software package in existence.

Even as 2018 demonstrates how much the size of our job grew in the past decade, the size of our team hasn't quite kept the same pace. When I started, there were just one and a half staff members dedicated to licensing at the FSF -- Brett Smith was the licensing and compliance manager at the time, and I was working with him part-time. I later moved to full time, and since then the team has stayed at just two staff members working with a team of paid and pro bono attorneys. Just think: we've expanded many programs, and created whole new ones, while still maintaining all the other programs of the Compliance Lab with just two staff. It's really a testament to what we can accomplish. Looking back over the past ten years fills me with pride, but also awe at the size of the job in front of us.

Reviewing past accomplishments always makes one think of challenges not yet met. We have to keep expanding and improving our work, if we want the next ten years to be as successful. But as always, that depends in large part on you. None of what we've done would have been possible without your support, and nothing that we hope for in the future will happen without your help. Will you build the foundation for the next great expansion?

The Licensing and Compliance team's work is fueled primarily by donors and associate members of the FSF. We are asking you to become an associate member or make a donation to the FSF to support our work expanding to new frontiers over the next year. Membership costs as little as $10 per month ($5 per month for students). Membership comes with benefits, and if you join by the end of 2018, you can choose to receive an enamel pin set, so you can wear your free software pride on your sleeve wherever you go.

Sincerely,
Donald Robertson, III
Licensing and Compliance Manager