Free Software Foundation Plans 30th Birthday Party to Celebrate FOSS

The Free Software Foundation, the first and probably most important organization to promote free and open source software, turns 30 in a few weeks. To mark the occasion, it has announced a conference and celebration in Boston featuring Richard Stallman, free-software advocacy extraordinaire.

The Free Software Foundation, or FSF, isn’t as old as free and open source software itself. Stallman’s GNU project, which he announced in September 1983 and launched the following January, predated the FSF by nearly two years.

Still, as the advocacy and public-relations arm of Stallman’s free-software crusade (Stallman and the FSF are not particularly keen on the term “open source,” by the way), the FSF has played a role at least as significant as GNU code itself in bringing free and open source software into the computers, phones, tablets, cars and drones of hundreds of millions of people—whether they know it or not. That’s why the 30th anniversary of the FSF’s launch is a big deal.

On Oct. 3, the FSF will hold what it calls a “birthday party” for itself in Boston, featuring an address by Stallman. Earlier in the day, the FSF plans a “mini-conference” at which “the free software community will share lessons from its first 30 years and plan for the future.”

The FSF also hopes supporters in other parts of the world will organize celebrations in their own locales. In addition, it encourages fans to celebrate its birthday on social media using the hashtag #FSF30—although it cautions against using social-media platforms that it deems unfriendly to free software.

The FSF’s 30th birthday is not likely to receive as much fanfare as another upcoming milestone in the free and open source software world: the 25th anniversary of Linus Torvalds’ introduction of Linux in August or September 1991. (Pinpointing the precise date of Linux’s birthday depends on which event you consider most significant—Torvalds’s announcement of the kernel project on Usenet on Aug. 25, 1991, or the first public release of Linux code on Sept. 17 of the same year.) Linux’s birthday will surely fuel countless headlines in the tech press next year, while the FSF’s anniversary early next month is enjoying a much lower profile.

But that shouldn’t diminish the present-day and historical significance of the FSF, without which Linux likely would have lacked the momentum to get off the ground. (That’s not to say the FSF is the reason Linux succeeded so spectacularly; on the contrary, it was only reluctantly that the FSF gradually lent its full support to Linux over the course of the 1990s. But that’s fodder for a future post, perhaps.) Whether most free-software fans or anyone else thinks about it much, the FSF has had a huge impact on the way computing, as well as other facets of life, look today.