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We can't advocate for freedom without your help
Quoting: We can't advocate for freedom without your help —
It's getting harder to live in freedom and it shouldn't have to be. Right now, around the world, Big Tech monopolies are attempting to normalize signing your digital autonomy away not only for convenience, but for basic needs. So-called artificial intelligence has only accelerated this. It's not just our basic computations that are being sent off to the "cloud," but more and more aspects of our daily lives, whether we want it or not. It's now commonplace to offload our thoughts to a GPU farm in Abilene, Texas before we're able to take that first step in cooking a meal, studying for a test, or even sending an email. Things don't have to be this way.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) was founded forty years ago in an effort to support GNU, the first operating system and first project to recognize why nonfree software is dangerous and do something about it. We've come a long way since then. GNU has arrived; I'm using it to write you now. But we need to do more. The software our community produced now powers the world; we ourselves have used it to carve out a niche in modern digital life where we know we can be free. That's not enough. Free software like GNU is needed now more than ever, by everyone, not just the technically capable.
Our advocacy and approaches to campaigning for your freedom have changed over the years, but we've always kept our focus. When we saw the proprietary software we call Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) on the rise, we created the Defective by Design campaign and launched the International Day Against DRM, which we'll be writing you about soon. We've combated bulk government surveillance, supported the right to repair, and have done our best to make starting the free software journey something more accessible than purchasing an eighteen year-old laptop and going it alone. We may be getting closer to dystopia by the day, but we're not down for the count yet. The FSF will continue to do everything in its power to keep that dystopia from happening, always working for a world where the machine serves you and not the other way around.