Free Software Foundation Received 1 Million USD from Handshake
The Free Software Foundation just received a series of earmarked charitable donations from Handshake. The donations amount to a total of $1 million USD. The FSF has already received a $1 million Bitcoin donation from the Pineapple Fund earlier this year. With all this funding, the FSF will be in a good position to develop necessary upgrades for the GNU Project, among other things.
The Free Software Foundation is of course a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, founded by Richard Stallman of GNU Project fame. Richard Stallman founded the FSF in 1985, in order to support free software development. He had already founded the Free / Open Source Software Movement in 1983. Therefore, the FSF is basically the official funding source of the FOSSM.
FSF Projects to be Funded
The Free Software Project plans on using the funds in the following projects:
- $100,000 for GNU Guix and GuixSD, which is an “advanced distribution of the GNU operating system”.
- $400,000 for the FSF’s organizational capacity, publications, licensing, and activist initiates.
- $200,000 for Replicant, a completely free mobile OS based on Android.
- $100,000 for GNU Octave, a language primarily to be used for numerical computations.
- $100,000 for helping the GNU Project combat things like nonfree Javascript.
- A final $100,000 for the GNU Toolchain.
The executive director of the Free Software Foundation, John Sullivan, had the following to say after FSF received the donations from Handshake:
“Building on the $1 million Bitcoin gift from the Pineapple Fund earlier this year, and our record high number of individual associate members, it is clear that software freedom is more important than ever to the world. We are now at a pivotal moment in our history, on the cusp of making free software the ‘kitchen table issue’ it must be. Thanks to Handshake and our members, the Free Software Foundation looks forward to scaling to the next level of free software activism, development, and community.”
