The Lighthouse at the Edge of the Digital Sea
Tue, 23 Dec 2025
As the final days of 2025 slip through our fingers like sand, I find myself looking back not just on the past twelve months, but on the last four decades. This year has been a milestone - a true testament to endurance. We celebrated the 40th anniversary of the FSF, marking forty years of holding the line against the encroaching tide of proprietary software.
In the stormy waters of the modern internet, where "the cloud" is often just a fog designed to obscure who really controls your computing, the FSF has remained our lighthouse. It's the steady beam that cuts through everything else with simple, immutable truth: You deserve to control the tools you use.
2025 was a year of action.
We saw the announcement of the Librephone project, an important initiative to reclaim the mobile frontier. This territory has, for too long, been a fortress of proprietary software and DRM. It's a bold step toward ensuring that the device in your pocket serves you, rather than someone else.
We witnessed the global community coming together for the FSF40 celebrations, from the hackathon that brought people together to polish free software, to the photo contest that visualized what freedom looks like in our daily lives. And just this month, we honored the tireless work of community members like Andy Wingo and Alx Sa with the Free Software Awards, proving that the heart of this movement is, and always will be, its people.
From fighting against the erosion of copyleft to championing the Right to Repair, the FSF has been in the trenches, doing the unglamorous but essential legal and advocacy work that keeps things free. They've been illuminating the path forward.
But a lighthouse can't burn without fuel.
The FSF fights an asymmetric battle by design. On one side, we have trillion-dollar tech monopolies with unlimited marketing budgets, lobbying power, and a vested interest in keeping users helpless. On the other side, we have us - a ragtag coalition of hackers, activists, and ethical users who believe that freedom is a human right.
The FSF has set a fundraising goal of $400,000 by January 1st. As of this writing, they still need our help to close that gap. The FSF does so much with so little. This amount, for the whole year, is equivalent to what Microsoft makes in about 45 seconds.
This money doesn't just pay for servers. It funds the campaigns that wake people up. It supports the Licensing and Compliance Lab that enforces the GPL, ensuring that when we share code, it stays free for everyone, forever. It ensures that when the next wave of "smart" devices tries to lock us out of our own lives, there's an organization ready to say "No."
The FSF has stood watch for forty years, ensuring that the four essential freedoms didn't flicker and die out in the 80s, 90s, or 2000s. Now, it's our turn to ensure they shine bright for the next forty.
We can't take this lighthouse for granted. If the light goes out, we're left navigating the reefs of digital restriction in the dark.
Let's help them finish this year strong. Let's make sure that when the sun rises in 2026, the FSF is fully funded, emboldened, and ready to fight for us. Whether it's the cost of a coffee or the price of one month of those proprietary streaming services you don't actually own, every bit helps keep the beacon lit.
Here's to freedom, now and for the future.