NewsForge: Less of RMS, More of Your Freedom: FSF’s Digital Speech Project

“Now that GNU/Linux is becoming a household commodity, the Free
Software Foundation is facing changes in its priorities. Used to be
that rounding up Free Software developers to complete a
non-proprietary operating system was job one. Now other things are
more urgent, like fighting digital rights management (or digital
‘restrictions’ management, as Richard M. Stallman puts it), and
enforcing the GPL. So when it comes to the public face of the FSF,
it means you may be seeing less of RMS and more of other
people.

“Like Bradley Kuhn, the executive director of the Free Software
Foundation, who is filling the role of spokesman and advocate with
enthusiasm. ‘I am charged with the task of bringing the message of
FSF to a broader audience,’ he says. Kuhn is fervent in his belief
that software freedom is for everyone, not just an elite few. ‘Of
course, I love the Free Software community and am an active member
of it. However, there was always one aspect of our community that
didn’t sit right with me: the idea that you had to ‘prove your
hacker credentials’ to be taken seriously. “‘Too often, we have a
tendency to develop Free Software that ‘scratches our own itches.’
While lots of useful and important Free Software does get written
that way, navel-gazing work can’t be the only focus…'”

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