Transcript of Peter Brown's video appeal

Hello, my name is Peter Brown and I'm the Executive Director at the Free Software Foundation.

The free software movement is one of the most successful social movements to emerge in the last 25 years, driven by a world-wide community of ethical programmers dedicated to the cause of freedom and sharing.

Yet the ultimate success of the free software movement depends upon teaching our friends, neighbors, and work colleagues about the danger of not having software freedom, about the danger of society losing control over its computing. The Free Software Foundation works on three fronts to advance the cause of the free software movement.

First, in software, we're the home of the GNU Project, the campaign to create a free operating system. We promote those distributions of the GNU system that are one-hundred-percent free, such as Trisquel and gNewsense — they demonstrate that freedom is possible and that free software is easy to use.

We also highlight high-priority free software projects. These projects make it easy for everyone to make the move to a GNU/Linux system, away from Windows or Mac OS.

We also maintain the free software definition, so that everyone knows what it means to have free software.

Second, in licensing, the Free Software Foundation publishes the world's most popular free software licenses, particularly the GNU General Public License, the only license written with the express purpose of protecting computer user freedom and preventing free software from becoming proprietary. We collect thousands of copyrights from free software developers and we register those copyrights with the U.S. copyright office, so that we can protect the distribution of free software world-wide, ensuring that corporations pass on to you all the rights that our free software licenses promise.

And third, we campaign for the adoption of free software and free data formats and against the adoption of proprietary software and proprietary data formats. We also run very important campaigns against digital restrictions such as DRM and treacherous computing. And we campaign against software patents that all too often restrict software development and put at risk everyone who distributes free software. But all these campaigns are focused at raising awareness as to why it is ethically and socially responsible for society to be in control of its computing. The Free Software Foundation is the only organization that focuses on this aspect, yet it is the most important area.

For society to have computer user freedom, we must make freedom our practical goal. Right now, the Free Software Foundation is running its year-end fundraising campaign. We rely entirely on individuals like you to donate or join the Free Software Foundation as its members. So if you use free software, if you use GNU/Linux and you support computer user freedom, please get involved, please join the FSF as a member and support our work.

Thank you very much.