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Free Software Foundation

by sdubois Contributions Published on Aug 20, 2010 04:34 PM
The Free Software Foundation is 501(c)3 non-for-profit with a worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom and to defend the rights of all free software users. Executive director Peter Brown explains FSF's exclusive use of free software and the availability of free software to do just about any job.
Peter Brown

"The FSF is a small nonprofit, so we don't compare to the other organizations featured in these profiles, but we do aim to serve as an example for how any organization can operate using only free software.

Currently, we manage over 60,000 contacts and 15,000 donation transactions per year. We have a book publishing operation, an online store, code repositories, archives, FTP sites, and several advocacy campaign websites with associated mailing lists.

We do all this work exclusively with free software.

Our servers all run GNU/Linux and utilize a free BIOS (Coreboot). Our desktop systems and laptops run the fully free Trisquel GNU/Linux. Our phone system is Asterisk. For our various campaign websites we've used Plone, Drupal and Wordpress. For fundraising and contact management we use CiviCRM. For database software we use PostgreSQL, and MySQL. Our mailing lists are run on GNU Mailman. Our internal wikis use MediaWiki and Ikiwiki. The accounting system is SQL-Ledger and I currently use Gnumeric for spreadsheets. Our other office software is OpenOffice.org. We do our graphic design and image editing with Inkscape and Gimp and we typeset with LaTeX.

Using free software in your home, school or business today is easy, and it connects you to a worldwide community dedicated to sharing and freedom. Free software is also an ethical choice, and promoting it's use will limit the social harm inflicted by proprietary software."

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