The Free Software Foundation's president Ian Kelling is also their senior systems administrator. This week he shared an example of how "the work we put in to making sure a program is free for us also makes it free for the rest of the world." During the COVID-19 pandemic, like everyone everywhere, the FSF increased its videoconferencing use, especially videoconferencing software that works in web browsers. We have experience hosting several different programs to accomplish this, and BigBlueButton was an important one for us for a while. It is a videoconferencing service which describes itself as a virtual classroom because of its many features designed for educational environments, such as a shared whiteboard... In BigBlueButton 2.2, the program used a freely licensed version of MongoDB, but it unintentionally picked up MongoDB's 2018 nonfree license change in versions 2.3 and 2.4. At the FSF, we noticed this [after a four-hour review] and raised the alarm with the BigBlueButton team in late 2020. In many cases of a developer changing to a nonfree license, free forks have won out, but in this case no one judged it worth the effort to maintain a fork of the final free MongoDB version. This was a very unfortunate case for existing users of MongoDB, including the FSF, who were then faced with a challenge of maintaining their freedom by either running old and unmaintained software or switching over to a different free program. Luckily, the free software world is not especially lacking in high quality database software, and there is also a wide array of free videoconferencing software. At the FSF, we decided to spend some effort to make sure MongoDB would no longer make BigBlueButton nonfree, to help other users of MongoDB and BigBlueButton. We think BigBlueButton is really useful for free software in schools, where it is incredibly important to have free software. On the tech team, especially when it comes to software running in a web browser, we are used to making modifications to better suit our needs. In the end, we didn't find a perfect solution, but we did find FerretDB to be a promising MongoDB alternative and assisted the developers of FerretDB to see what would be required for it to work in BigBlueButton. The BigBlueButton developers decided that some architectural level changes for their 3.0 release would be the path for them to remove MongoDB. As of BigBlueButton 3.0, released in 2025, BigBlueButton is back to being entirely free software...! As you can see, in the world of free software, trust can be tricky, and this is part of why organizations like the FSF are so important. Kelling notes he's part of a tech team of just two people reponsible for "63 different services, platforms, and websites for the FSF staff, the GNU Project, other community projects, and the wider free software community..."

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On Wednesday (Christmas Eve), the Free Software Foundation announced it had received two major contributions totaling around $900,000 USD — in the cryptocurrency Monero. The two donations "are among some of the largest private gifts ever made to the organization," the FSF said in a statement. "The donors wish to remain anonymous," according to the FSF's statement: The organization is in its annual winter fundraising drive, currently at three-quarters of its $400,000 USD winter goal, and will now switch its focus to a member drive thanks in part to these donations... The donation will support the organization's technical team and infrastructure capacity, as well as strengthen its campaigns, education, licensing, and advocacy initiatives, and future opportunities. The FSF is seeking donations until year-end after which they aim to gain 100 associate members through its year-end fundraising ending January 16. The FSF's executive director said the donations prove "that software freedom is recognized more and more as a principal issue today, at the core of several other social movements people care about like privacy, ownership, and the right to repair... "We are proudly supported by a large variety of contributors who care about digital rights. All donations matter, whether $5 or $500,000."

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This week the Free Software Foundation honored Andy Wingo, Alx Sa, and Govdirectory with this year's annual Free Software Awards (given to community members and groups making "significant" contributions to software freedom): Andy Wingo is one of the co-maintainers of GNU Guile, the official extension language of the GNU operating system and the Scheme "backbone" of GNU Guix. Upon receiving the award, he stated: "Since I learned about free software, the vision of a world in which hackers freely share and build on each others' work has been a profound inspiration to me, and I am humbled by this recognition of my small efforts in the context of the Guile Scheme implementation. I thank my co-maintainer, Ludovic Courtès, for his comradery over the years: we are just building on the work of the past maintainers of Guile, and I hope that we live long enough to congratulate its many future maintainers." The 2024 Award for Outstanding New Free Software Contributor went to Alx Sa for work on the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). When asked to comment, Alx responded: "I am honored to receive this recognition! I started contributing to the GNU Image Manipulation Program as a way to return the favor because of all the cool things it's allowed me to do. Thanks to the help and mentorship of amazing people like Jehan Pagès, Jacob Boerema, Liam Quin, and so many others, I hope I've been able to help other people do some cool new things, too." Govdirectory was presented with this year's Award for Projects of Social Benefit, given to a project or team responsible for applying free software, or the ideas of the free software movement, to intentionally and significantly benefit society. Govdirectory provides a collaborative and fact-checked listing of government addresses, phone numbers, websites, and social media accounts, all of which can be viewed with free software and under a free license, allowing people to always reach their representatives in freedom... The FSF plans to further highlight the Free Software Award winners in a series of events scheduled for the new year to celebrate their contributions to free software.

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The Free Software Foundation describes how "After months of preparation and excitement, we finally came together on November 21 for a global online hackathon to support free software projects and "put a spotlight on the difficult and often thankless work that free software hackers carry out..." Based on how many of you dropped in over the weekend and were incredibly engaged in the important work that is improving free software, either as a spectator or as a participant, this goal was accomplished. And it's all thanks to you! Friday started a little rocky with a datacenter outage affecting most FSF services. Participants spread out to work on six different free software projects over forty-eight hours as our tech team worked to restore all FSF sites with the help and support of the community. Over three hundred folks were tuned in at a time, some to participate in the hackathon and others to follow the progress being made. As a community, we got a lot done over the weekend... It was amazing to see so many of you take a little (or a lot of!) time out of your busy schedules to improve free software, and we're incredibly grateful for each and every one of you. It really energizes us and shows us how much we can accomplish when we work together over even just a couple days. Not only was this a fantastic sight to see because of the work we got done, but it was also a very fitting way to conclude our fortieth anniversary celebration events. Free software has been and always will be a community effort, one that continues to get better and better because of the dedicated developers, contributors, and users who ensure its existence. Thank you for celebrating forty years of the FSF and fighting for a freer future for us all.

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