“The list of the community-based actions the FSF has taken in
the past year is a long one. It begins with an expanded role for
some of its longstanding institutions. Throughout the year, the
FSF’s high-priority list seems to have exerted some influence on
such items as the open source release of the Java code and the
growing interest in LinuxBIOS by chipset manufacturers. Similarly,
the FSF’s compliance lab, although now more than five years old,
enlisted five volunteers to answer licensing questions using a
ticket system, and now fields more than 75 questions each week,
according to compliance engineer Brett Smith. In the last couple of
years, too, rather than maintaining just the GNU Project Web site,
the FSF has also started a non-developer site that Peter Brown,
executive director of the FSF, describes as carrying “more of a
mainstream message.”“Even more importantly, during 2006, the FSF initiated public
discussions about the revision of the GNU Public License…”