There is no collective freedom without you

By Zoë Kooyman, Executive Director

"When there is a deliberate choice to restrict, the harmful consequences are deliberate destruction. [...] GNU serves as an example to inspire and a banner to rally others to join us in sharing. This can give us a feeling of harmony which is impossible if we use software that is not free." This quote is taken from the GNU Manifesto, which was published a few months before the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) founding, forty years ago this October. It is this philosophy that launched the free software movement. It shaped the definition of "free software" and resulted in the FSF's mission of promoting worldwide computer user freedom.

Choose the GPL instead of a "no attribution" license for your next program

By Krzysztof Siewicz, Licensing and Compliance Manager

Just because a license is free does not mean it serves the goals of the free software movement well. With no attribution (NA) licenses, things can get really bad. NA licenses are simple, non-copyleft free software licenses, compatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL), that do not require preserving copyright and license notices. Using these licenses leads to confusion, liability risk, and taking freedom away from users.

I didn't get free software until I became a reverse engineer

By Joshua Tint, Free software advocate

Free software can remain an abstract concept until you're staring down the barrel of a 10MB executable in a hex editor. It was to me when I began my first year of college. Like many budding software engineers, I saw free software as a subculture for hobbyists and tinkerers. It was interesting, even admirable, but not particularly relevant to me. I didn't run a free operating system, and didn't see much reason to. I was a computer science student who loved coding, but assumed that proprietary and free software simply coexisted, each with its place in the world. I didn't begin to see the stakes more clearly until I spent a summer working with a small engineering firm.

Free software can strengthen the US healthcare system

By Eko K. A. Owen, Outreach and Communications Coordinator

Few people who have interacted with the US healthcare system can report a stress-free and cost-effective experience, no matter as a patient or provider. The reasons for the anemic healthcare system are broad, including the high cost of care and insufficient number of medical practitioners. Other problems are less quantitative, like increasing distrust in providers and treatments and limited preventive care. Free software, such as GNU Health (a free software hospital management information system), has the power to alleviate some of the problems present in the US healthcare system.

Defending Savannah from DDoS attacks

By Michael McMahon, GNU/Linux Systems Administrator

Corwin Brust, Bob Proulx, & Luke Yasuda, Savannah hackers

Savannah is under heavy attack, likely from one or more organizations using a massive botnet to build a dataset for training large language models (LLMs). Since January 2025, a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack has been underway. With metrics for our IP blocklist reaching five million in February 2025. In this article, we will introduce Savannah and some tools and techniques that the Savannah hackers and FSF system administrators use to mitigate DDoS attacks against GNU resources and the FSF network. This series of attacks is not limited to Savannah: staff and volunteers have read about similar attacks against other software forges including Sourceware, Pagure, GitLab instances, SourceHut, and Codeberg, as well as Gitea and Forgejo instances. We hope this article can help others fight these attacks as well.