FSF turns forty with a groundbreaking new project and a new president

Summary

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA (Saturday, October 4, 2025) — The Free Software Foundation (FSF) celebrated its fortieth birthday today and presented the new president, the LibrePhone Project, and a vision for 2026 to the free software community. The FSF's fortieth birthday celebration, FSF40, was an action-packed event. The day began with a conversation between board members Christina Haralanova, Geoffrey Knauth, Gerald J. Sussman, Ian Kelling, and Richard M. Stallman, who discussed the FSF's mission and their vision for the FSF's future. It was during this discussion that Ian Kelling was presented as the new FSF president. When Kelling was later asked about his plans as president, he stated: "I aim to strengthen the FSF's ability to combat new threats to computer user freedom, as well as welcome more free software supporters into the movement than ever before." After the new FSF board panel, the microphone was passed to prominent free software activists to offer their stories and experiences with free software. Three volunteers had a lot to say about their extensive work on free software projects. Amin Bandali, a computing scientist, has worked on various programs in the GNU project, EmacsConf, Debian development, Trisquel GNU/Linux distribution contributions, and with the the FSF SysOps team for many years. Corwin Brust, a Savannah Hacker since 2020, spoke mostly about his work with the Savannah Hackers and Emacs. Panos Alevropoulos, a lawyer from Thessaloniki, Greece, shared his experiences with the FSF as an intern and as a volunteer with the FSF’s Licensing & Compliance Lab as well as the FSF's End Software Patents campaign. In the afternoon, FSF executive director Zoë Kooyman announced an exciting new project: Librephone. Librephone is a new initiative by the FSF to bring full computing freedom to mobile computing environments. The LibrePhone Project is a partnership with Rob Savoye, a developer who has worked on free software (including the GNU toolchain) since t...