Throughout the year, the Free Software Foundation keeps you
informed about our licensing and campaigns work. But one crucial
part of our staff fly under the radar much of the time: the tech
team. Our sysadmins and Web
developer keep the FSF humming and provide resources and services
that the GNU Project needs to write
awesome code:
They enable the FSF to embody the free software
philosophy by
maintaining an infrastructure that runs exclusively on free
software and includes about a dozen main servers, half of which
are virtual machine (VM) hosts running 101 VMs, as well as many
Web sites, including
LibrePlanet, the
community-driven wiki for free software activism, and the Free
Software
Directory. The FSF
is living proof that all functions of a nonprofit
organization can be performed using only free software, and we
are proud to set this positive example for others.
They provide infrastructure for GNU developers, including web
space (gnu.org has about 15 million unique
visitors each year), software
hosting, mailing
lists that send about 500,000 emails
per day, and ftp.gnu.org, which averages 225 TB of bandwidth
each year. They provide extra support and bug trackers for some
GNU projects, including GNU
Emacs and
Coreutils.
They provide mirroring and buildservers for several free
GNU/Linux distros, including
Trisquel,
Guix, and
Parabola, plus hosting for
Replicant, the fully free Android
distribution.
At the annual LibrePlanet free software
conference,
the tech team works with volunteers to
stream
and record sessions using free software so that the community
can participate even if they can't make it to Cambridge.
They maintain the FSF's Tor
relay node.
They contribute code upstream to free software projects used in
the FSF's work, and report bugs they encounter in order to help
improve that software, including
CiviCRM.
In the past two years, the team has devoted much energy to
migrating and upgrading the FSF's membership
system to CiviCRM. This change has brought
a host of new benefits and challenges: the FSF can now accept
funds for GNU projects, including GNU
Mediagoblin, GNU
Radio, GNU
Mailman, and most
recently, GNU Guix. It has
also allowed the FSF to be much more efficient in our
communications with the public.
Recently, the tech team has added new staff, including Trisquel
GNU/Linux developer Ruben Rodriguez Perez as senior sysadmin and Kosa, a web developer.
In the coming year, the tech team has a big wish list they'd like
to achieve, including:
growing and updating the FSF and the GNU Project's existing
infrastructure in order to accommodate new GNU projects;
improving the FSF's development infrastructure to allow us to
bring in more volunteers and community members working on FSF
sysadmin and web development projects;
launching a new and improved fsf.org;
improving email and other services for GNU developers and FSF
members.
Our tech team keeps the FSF and the GNU Project running -- and in
order to fulfill their goals for 2016, they need your support. In
particular, each time the team replaces hardware, they must seek
out computers that use libreboot or
coreboot, and that avoid non-free video BIOS or other blobs. But
the extra effort put into this work ensures that we can offer GNU
projects and the free software community more resources powered
exclusively by free software and freedom-respecting hardware.
Can you support free software community infrastructure by
making a donation to the Free Software
Foundation?
Donating today is a fine way to give back in support of all the
great free software you used this year. You can also make a
long-term commitment to supporting the FSF, the GNU Project, and
the free software community by becoming an associate
member
of the FSF for as little as $10/month (student memberships are
further discounted). Membership offers many great
benefits, too.
Do you want to learn more about volunteering with the FSF's tech
team? Contact sysadmin@gnu.org to learn more.