Meet FSF President Ian Kelling

Newly-appointed FSF President Ian Kelling is eager to advance software freedom and the FSF.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has been looking for a new president ever since Geoffrey Knauth committed to leaving the position in 2021. Filling this position was not easy. There are general requirements that need to be satisfied, like where the person is located or confirmation there are no conflicts of interest. Besides these qualifications, we needed someone knowledgeable of the free software issues we're facing, and who is excited to work with the staff and myself to push the FSF forward and grow the free software movement!

After long deliberation, the board's eye fell onto an unexpected candidate: Ian Kelling. Unexpected only because Kelling has been a staff member for the last eight years as the FSF's senior system's administrator where he, among other things, maintains the FSF's infrastructure with only free software. He was elected to represent the staff as the union seat representative when the seat was created in 2021 and helped the board set up the process for electing new board members, resulting in four new board members in the past year. Kelling is filling the FSF president role as a volunteer while continuing his paid role as the FSF's senior systems administrator (non-union for the duration of his presidency). I decided to ask him some questions about who he is and about his connection to free software.

Can you tell us a little about yourself?

I was born in San Diego, California, in 1981, where I was introduced to activism at an early age. I was raised by my two mothers, an arrangement which was not socially acceptable to most people in our city. One of my moms founded Paradigm Women's Bookstore, a popular gathering space for San Diego lesbians that offered feminist and lesbian music, literature, and live performances in the late 1980s and early 1990s. My family and I spent a lot of time in the local lesbian community and we marched in the pride parade every year.

What does free software mean to you?

I got my first computer as a teenager, but had no idea that it was feasible for me to write a new program or modify an existing one. After high school, I spent one semester in college and then a few years woodworking as my day job. Eventually, I went back to college and learned about GNU and free software when I took an introductory programming class. Exploring and contributing to the world of free software quickly became a lifelong hobby. After college, I didn't find any great opportunities to work in free software and I spent some years working at mostly proprietary software companies in the Seattle area.

That experience solidified my personal belief in complete software freedom. I focused on gaining skills to work exclusively on GNU/Linux, and finally made that a professional reality when I started working for the FSF in 2017 as the senior systems administrator. I've contributed to pieces of free software like GNU Emacs, community efforts like the Free Software Directory and others, and I've been a speaker at the Seattle GNU/Linux conference (SeaGL) and FOSDEM.

Another theme in my life which drew me toward free software was my experience in different communities. I grew up playing soccer and learning about being on a team, and have been on adult recreational teams on and off throughout my life. As a teenager, I was part of a community of fans and friends of local music bands which centered around the Ché Café, a student-run worker co-operative on the University of California San Diego campus. In my woodworking days, I became part of a close-knit online gaming community which played a proprietary game called Ultima Online: Renaissance. That activity ended because the software vendor shut the game server down in an attempt to get players to play a related game that they had just released. Amazingly, there have been free software implementations of the game since then, but it took many years. After that, I spent several years volunteering with the San Diego Derby Dolls where I refereed, was a player in many practice sessions, and where my girlfriend was a team member. And of course, there are many communities related to free software which I've had some part in. The most influential one to me was a small LibrePlanet group in the Seattle area around 2015.

The free software community is made up of all kinds of people, and is stronger for it.

What do you most look forward to as FSF president?

I'm excited about having a positive impact on the free software movement and the FSF. I want to do what I can to bring software freedom forward, and while I never expected it to be in this role, I am grateful for the trust that has been placed in me. Having an internal leadership role at FSF is not especially visible but there is a lot of important work to do. We live in a time where priorities for software freedom are hard to pin down because of the pervasiveness of proprietary software in our daily lives. I want us to set goals to push the organization forward and make a significant difference in people's lives. I personally also have room to grow, like in the public speaking area, but I am excited to take it all on. I can't say which part I'm looking forward to most: it is all exciting to me. I also hope I can inspire someone new to care about software freedom.

We are very excited to have Ian Kelling as our new president, and confident that he will lead the free software movement and the FSF to an impactful future.

"Ian Kelling speaks at LibrePlanet" © 2025 by the Free Software Foundation, Inc. This image is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

"A cheer for FSF40" © 2025 by the Free Software Foundation, Inc., by Luke Canniff. This image is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.