FSFE Potteries / Meeting on 12/10/2021: FSFE sister and alternate organisations
This page has some brief notes and imagery surrounding a past meeting, you likely got here by clicking a link shown on a past calendar event.
For this meeting we decided to try and explore the greater world of Free Software organisations... given we're now a part of one! Naturally most people had heard of the original Free Software Foundation with their links to the GNU project being the main reason.
FSFE is actually a sister organisation of FSF as they detail on this web page, although it is important to note that they did originally form as a result of efforts by FSF to make sure there was "a major FSF" for each region or whole continent.
We briefly looked at similar organisations like OpenUK and OSI... but none of them quite got to the core message, that being the value of Free Software. The only organisation which seems to be also purely about this, and in the same region... seems to be a splinter group from FSFE known as The Free Software Fellowship. Although we hesitate to link to their site... as it would appear to mostly be a blog that just targets FSFE for their efforts (rather than actually having much to say about Free Software itself). We couldn't independently substantiate anything they really had to say (so it's hard to say what is and is not true), and ultimately we've had nothing but a good relationship with FSFE to date.
Naturally the topic of the recent issues with Richard Stallman eventually came up... some simply thought it was a communication problem, and others thought it was that he needed a severe reality check. Either way it would appear FSFE have distanced themselves from FSF and we read the FSFE announcement regarding RMS rejoining the FSF board here.
All done for this meeting... hopefully 2022 will be a brighter year!