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Turning freedom values into freedom practice with the FSF tech team
Quoting: Turning freedom values into freedom practice with the FSF tech team —
My name is Ian Kelling. I am the senior systems administrator at the FSF and also the president of the FSF, a role I fulfill on a voluntary basis. The FSF tech team runs a lot of software, including sixty-three different services, platforms, and websites for the FSF staff, the GNU Project, other community projects, and the wider free software community. We work hard to do it all on our own computers, so we maintain a dozen physical servers in two Boston data centers.
The tech team isn't one of the more publicly visible teams at the FSF. Behind the scenes, we put in a lot of effort to be able to do our work in software freedom and help others do the same. This isn't just something we have to do in minor edge cases; we can only host conferences, schedule meetings, and process financial transactions as a result of this work. We're glad to say it helps thousands. The work we put in to making sure a program is free for us also makes it free for the rest of the world.
We are always on the lookout for new software. There are hundreds of thousands of useful free software programs in the world; figuring out which ones to use and whether a program is free software is a challenge we tackle regularly. The first place we often look for a free program is in the package repository of a free as in freedom GNU/Linux distribution, such as Trisquel in our case. To search the repository, I usually start with the standard command-line approach of apt-cache search. This searches through tens of thousands of packages. One of the biggest reasons we start with this method is that we know that this software has gone through a thorough review to determine it is free by the developers of the operating system. There is another notable collection of verified free software that can search through because of a program we run ourselves: the Free Software Directory. When searching both places doesn't yield a good result, we look further afield to a search engine or Wikipedia.