Recently, we got some terrific news: Charity Navigator, an independent evaluator of US-based nonprofit charities, awarded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) a four star rating, the highest available. According to the confirmation letter from Charity Navigator president Michael Thatcher, this rating demonstrates the FSF's "strong financial health and commitment to accountability and transparency." A four star charity, according to their ratings, "exceeds industry standards and outperforms most charities in its cause."

This is our seventh time in a row receiving the coveted four star rating! Only 7% of the charities that Charity Navigator evaluates have gotten this many in a row, and they assess over 9,000 charities a year. As Thatcher's letter says, "This exceptional designation from Charity Navigator sets the Free Software Foundation apart from its peers and demonstrates to the public its trustworthiness." Even better: our overall score went from 96.66 out of 100% last year, up to 98.55 this cycle.

We do score 100% in the transparency category, which we work very hard at. You can see all of our audited financials at https://www.fsf.org/about/financial, and our yearly annual reports give you even more details about our activities. It's nice to see this effort pay off.

This is why you can be confident that when you contribute to the FSF, we're going to turn your money into free software advocacy, infrastructure, and development – and you don't have to just take our word for it, either. We have a certificate that says so! And if you need more confirmation, you can see Charity Navigator's breakdown of our facts and figures on their Free Software Foundation summary page.

LibrePlanet started out as a gathering of Free Software Foundation (FSF) associate members, and has remained a community event ever since. We are proud to bring so many different people together to discuss the latest developments and the future of free software. We envision that some day there will be satellite instances all over the globe livestreaming our annual conference on technology and social justice -- and you can create your own today! All you need is a venue, a screen, and a schedule of LibrePlanet events, which we'll be releasing soon. This year, a free software supporter in Ontario, Canada, has confirmed an event, and we encourage you to host one, too.

Of course, ideally you'll be able to join us in person for LibrePlanet 2020: "Free the Future." If you can come, please register now to let us know -- FSF associate members attend gratis. We are looking forward to receiving the community at the newly confirmed Back Bay Events Center this year. We've put together some information on where to eat, sleep, and park in the vicinity of the new venue.

However, we know that not every free software enthusiast can make it to Boston, which is why we livestream the entire event. You can view it solo, with friends, or even with a large group of like-minded free software enthusiasts! It is a great opportunity to bring other people in your community together to view some of the foremost speakers in free software, including Internet Archive founder and Internet Hall of Famer Brewster Kahle.

We will also host an IRC instance, #libreplanet on Freenode, through which you can be in direct contact with the room monitors, who can relay any questions you may have about the talks going on here in Boston.

If you are working on getting a group of people together for the event, please let us and others know by announcing it on the LibrePlanet wiki and the LibrePlanet email list. If you have any questions, if you need any help organizing, if you'd like some free FSF sticker packs, or if you just want to let us know about a satellite instance, email us at campaigns@fsf.org. We look forward to receiving you here in Boston and all over the world.

LibrePlanet needs volunteers -- maybe you!

LibrePlanet has grown every year in size and scope -- and its continued success is thanks to dozens of volunteers who help prepare for and run the conference. Volunteering is a great way to meet fellow community members and contribute to LibrePlanet, even if you can't attend in person. And yes, remote volunteers are definitely needed to help us moderate IRC chat rooms -- you can help us out from anywhere in the world!

If you are interested in volunteering for LibrePlanet 2020, email resources@fsf.org. We thank all of our in-person volunteers by offering them gratis conference admission, lunch, and a LibrePlanet T-shirt.

Help others attend!

Take your support for LibrePlanet to the next level by helping others attend. We get a lot of requests from people internationally who would like to attend the event. We try to help as many as we can, and with your support, we can really put the "planet" in LibrePlanet.

We also hope that you'll spread the word about LibrePlanet 2020: write a blog, or take it to social media to let people know that you'll be there, using the hashtag #libreplanet.

We hope to see you in March!

Since its launch on January 24th, we've had an overwhelming amount of support in our call to "upcycle" Windows 7. Truthfully, the signature count flew far faster than we ever expected it to, even despite our conservative (if aptly numbered) goal of 7,777 signatures. We have seen the campaign called quixotic and even "completely delusional," but in every case, people have recognized the "pragmatic idealism" that is at the core of the FSF's message. Even where this campaign has been attacked, it's nevertheless been understood that the FSF really does want all software to be free software. We recommend every fully free operating system that we are aware of, and want to be able to expand that list to include every operating system. So long as any remain proprietary, we will always work to free them.

Over the last few weeks, we have been carefully watching the press coverage, and are glad to see the message of software freedom popping up in so many places at once. We received a lot of support, and have responded to dozens of comments expressing support, concern, and even outrage over why the FSF would think that upcycling Windows 7 was a good idea, and why it was something we would want to demand.

Microsoft can free Windows. They already have all of the legal rights necessary or the leverage to obtain them. Whether they choose to do so or not is up to them. In the past weeks, we've given them the message that thousands of people around the world want Windows to be freed. Next, we'll give them the medium.

This afternoon we will be mailing an upcycled hard drive along with the signatures to Microsoft's corporate offices. It's as easy as copying the source code, giving it a license notice, and mailing it back to us. As the author of the most popular free software license in the world, we're ready to give them all of the help we can. All they have to do is ask.

We want them to show exactly how much love they have for the "open source" software they mention in in their advertising. If they really do love free software -- and we're willing to give them the benefit of the doubt -- they have the opportunity to show it to the world. We hope they're not just capitalizing on the free software development model in the most superficial and exploitative way possible: by using it as a marketing tool to fool us into thinking that they care about our freedom.

Together, we've stood up for our principles. They can reject us, or ignore us, but what they cannot do is stop us. We'll go on campaigning, until all of us are free.

Every year, Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) encourages supporters to celebrate Valentine’s Day as “I Love Free Software Day,” a day for supporters to show their gratitude to the people who enable them to enjoy software freedom, including maintainers, contributors, and other activists. It seems appropriate on this holiday to once again address how seeking love on the Internet is, unfortunately, laden with landmines for your freedom and privacy. But today, I’m also going to make the argument that our community should think seriously about developing a freedom-respecting alternative.

Before we get started, though: make sure to show your love and gratitude for free software on February 14 and beyond! Share the graphic below with the hashtag #ilovefs:

With that said: as you probably heard earlier this year, the hydra-headed Match Group, which divides its customers among Tinder, OKCupid, Match.com, Hinge, and others, as well as several other dating companies, was revealed to be sharing user information in flagrant violation of privacy laws. OKCupid was caught sharing what was described as “highly personal data about sexuality, drug use, political views, and more,” and Grindr has been caught multiple times sharing users' HIV status. All of these apps also tell Facebook everything, whether a user has a profile or not (remember, even if you're not a user, you probably have a shadow Facebook profile!). This is typical behavior for modern technology companies, but the fact that it’s so ordinary makes it neither less ugly nor less flagrant.

Why do people put up with this? It isn’t that they don’t know that their personal information is being treated like candy tossed from a parade float: in 2014, Pew Research Center found that 91% of poll participants “agree or strongly agree that people have lost control over how personal information is collected and used by all kinds of entities.” A 2017 survey found that only 9% of social media users felt sure that Facebook and their ilk were protecting their data. And a 2017 Pew study led researchers to conclude that “a higher percentage of online participation certainly does not indicate a higher level of trust.” One anonymous commenter quipped, “People will expect data breaches, but will use online services anyway because of their convenience. It’s like when people accepted being mugged as the price of living in New York.”

It turns out that even if they're aware of how these companies are mistreating us, many people are making a cost-benefit analysis, and perceiving the benefits they get from these downright skeevy programs as valuable enough to be worth the ever-increasing exposure to the advertisers’ panopticon. As one anonymous Web and mobile developer from the Pew study said, “Being able to buy groceries when you’re commuting, talking with colleagues when doing a transatlantic flight, or simply ordering food for your goldfish right before skydiving will allow people to take more advantage of the scarcest good of our modern times: time itself.”

Here at the Free Software Foundation (FSF), we disagree strongly that the tradeoff is worth it, and it’s central to our mission to convince software users that letting developers pull their strings is destructive to their lives and dangerous to our society. When you use proprietary software, the program controls you, and the people who develop that program can use it as a tool to manipulate you in many absolutely terrifying ways. The same can also be true of services where the software is not distributed at all and is therefore neither free nor nonfree; but step one is to ditch all of the proprietary apps and JavaScript these companies try to get people to use.

Nevertheless, our battle is going to be an uphill one when a majority of people perceive conveniences to be worth the cost. In the case of dating Web sites, by 2015, 59% of people polled by Pew agreed that “online dating is a good way to meet people.” And it’s perceived, at least to some degree, as being effective: according to Pew, “nearly half of the public knows someone who uses online dating or who has met a spouse or partner via online dating.” eHarmony claimed, according to this 2019 article, that four percent of US marriages begin on their site, while a poll by The Knot found that twenty two percent of spouses polled met online. (The eHarmony stats may be questionable, but as part of a sales pitch, it definitely works to draw people in.)

Conversely, the alternative to online dating doesn’t feel very rosy to an increasing number of people. The same poll on The Knot found that one in five couples polled were introduced in a more traditional way, through their personal network, which sounds terrific, except for one small problem: our IRL social networks are shrinking. In 2009, Psychology Today reported that 25% of Americans have not a single friend or family member they can count on, and half of all Americans had nobody outside of their immediate family. So, how do you meet the elusive love of your life? It’s unsurprising that many people reluctantly choose the less obvious potential harms of OKCupid over the more tangible harms of isolation and loneliness. (After all, they’re not exactly trumpeting on their front page, “We’ll help you find a date, but in the meantime, we have information about what you’re into in bed, and we’ll give it to whoever we like!”)

This quandary sets up an extraordinarily unfair proposition: nobody should be forced to sacrifice their freedom in the name of a perceived shot at happiness. At the end of the day, we maintain that it’s not worth it, and you should keep Mark Zuckerberg as far away from your love life as possible, but I don’t think we should stop there, either. I believe that ethical, freedom-respecting online services that facilitate people’s social lives, from finding someone to date to staying in touch with friends far away, are an important social good, and that the free software movement has something unique and important to contribute.

Just as we have encouraged free software enthusiasts to move their social media presence from the walled gardens of Facebook to decentralized, federated services like Mastodon, GNU social, Pixelfed, and Diaspora, we would love to be able to point lovelorn free software supporters to an online dating site that will treat them like a human being rather than a commodity to be dissected into chunks of profitable data. So while we can’t endorse a project that’s barely gotten started at all, much less one that’s being built on Kickstarter, we were pleased to see a Redditor introduce the idea of Alovoa, which “aims to be the first widespread free software dating Web application on the Web.” Alovoa is licensed under AGPLv3, which is an excellent signpost for ethical behavior in the future.

Is Alovoa the solution? It’s far too early to say -- but we do know that the only acceptable solution will be a dating site that is 100% free software. And we also know that the free software community possesses the talent and conviction to make that alternative happen. When you’re freely permitted to use, share, study, modify, and share the modifications of the software you own, there are no shackles on your creativity: you can build the programs that you need, and make them available to everyone else who needs them. Perhaps we can solve the problem of how to find love online without sacrificing your privacy, and that’s only the beginning of the many problems we can solve. If we can build free software that offers ordinary people the conveniences they crave without the ethical tradeoffs, then someday, we will have a future where all software is free.

On January 17th, we closed the Free Software Foundation (FSF)'s end of the year fundraiser and associate membership drive, bringing 368 new associate members to the FSF community.

This year's fundraiser began with a series of shareable images aiming to bring user freedom issues to the kitchen table, helping to start conversations about the impact that proprietary software has on the autonomy and privacy of our everyday lives. Your enthusiasm in sharing these has been inspiring. We also debuted the ShoeTool video, an animated short presenting a day in the life of an unfortunate elf who is duped into forking over his liberty for the sake of convenience. And we also sent out our biannual issue of the Free Software Bulletin, which had FSF staff writing on topics as diverse as ethical software licensing and online dating.

It is your support of the FSF that makes all of our work possible. Your generosity impacts us on a direct level. It doesn't just keep the lights on, but is also the source of our motivation to fight full-time for software freedom. Your support is at the heart of our work advocating for the use of copyleft and the GPL. It's also what brought seventeen new devices to the RYF program this year, and is what drives our campaigning against Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). We are deeply grateful for the new memberships and donations we have received this year, not to mention the existing members and recurring donors that have enabled us to reach this point. And not to worry, we're working hard to send you the premium gifts we offered as soon as possible!

2020 has started off strong already, with our petition calling on Microsoft to "upcycle" Windows 7 by releasing it as free software, which has reached more than 12,000 signatures in less than a week. And there is much more to come. The campaigns, tech, and licensing teams are all working on ambitious projects that we hope will drive the fight for freedom forward, especially as the FSF enters its 35th year of free software activism.

This year's LibrePlanet: "Free the Future" conference is almost upon us as well, and we're all putting our best into the planning process. LibrePlanet 2020 will see keynotes from speakers including Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, and there are still more surprises to come. We hope to see you there.