Thank you!

As we enter into our final hours of our yearly membership drive, I wanted to thank all our supporters and welcome our nearly 450 new members!

I'm happy to report that this has been the most successful membership drive since we launched the program in 2002. We are still 50 short of our goal of 500 new associate members. So, here's the challenge for today. Please consider:

• Becoming an associate member
• Giving a gift membership to a friend
• Or referring a friend to join - and receive recognition

The Free Software Foundation is proud to have such a dedicated and diverse membership base that spans across a wide range of ages, economies, countries, and cultures. We see our community at work every day voicing their support for freedom and working hard to make positive contributions to the free software world.

We hope to continue building our capacity as an organization to communicate, work with, and meet the needs of the free software community. As the newest member of the Free Software Foundation team, joining as a campaigns manager in May of 2007, I have witnessed first hand the efforts of the community, and I can tell you that the outpouring of support and work that I see happening is remarkable and it is a wonderful thing to be a part of. I would like to share a few of them with you:

Throughout the updating of five major licenses, including the GNU GPLv3 and GNU APGLv3, we received thousands of comments and suggestions over multiple drafts from hundreds of individuals from all over the world.

In our campaigning efforts to eliminate DRM, we have have reached over 25,000 individuals who signed-up for DefectiveByDesign.org, and well over 30,000 signatures on letters and petitions, and hundreds of individuals taking the time out of their day to join us in protests and in actions. And the results are striking, we are seeing both producers and distributors begin to take on marketing platforms advertising "DRM-Free music" and officials at the BBC Trust citing our protests and demands, while taking steps to begin moving away from DRM. DRM is now seen as an unethical practice.

Lastly, I witnessed the drive and determination of our president, Richard Stallman, who last year gave over 90 invited talks to over 8,000 unique individuals around the globe. His dedication to the cause of user freedom and free software is tireless and inspirational. But, it is the outpouring of support and ideas that follows his visits around the globe that makes my job rewarding and worthwhile, because it is through this process that I know his hard work is paying off and that the free software movement is steadily growing and strengthening.

I look forward to working with and talking to many of you this year. And on behalf of myself and the entire staff at the Free Software Foundation, we thank all of you for your support. And now it is our duty to turn your support into success.

To those members who can make it to our annual members meeting on March 15th, please sign up today. And for those of you who cannot make it, we hope you will follow the live blog and join us on IRC for a couple of hours and ask our board of directors and staff questions and to give them advice and ideas for the coming year. Members can join the discussion now in the members forum.

Sincerely,

Joshua Gay

Campaigns Manager

Free Software Foundation