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Our members help secure the future of a free society

byHeshan de Silva-Weeramuni Contributions — Published on Jan 13, 2026 02:28 PM

Three more days: that's how long we have before our deadline to reach our goal of welcoming 100 new FSF associate members. We can do this: we need just 38 more people to join us to help further software freedom for all. Associate members are central to the FSF's mission to help secure the future of a free society. Free software plays such a vital role in guaranteeing so many other basic freedoms that are being undermined right now, like the right to be free of mass surveillance or the right to read what you want. For the FSF staff and our hard-working volunteers, FSF associate members are a crucial part of our efforts to support the rest of the larger global free software community. When you become a member, you grow our collective strength by joining thousands of other people who symbolically stand behind the FSF, lending further weight to our work and helping us pave our way to software freedom. Becoming an associate member also helps the FSF build a strong, predictable funding base that fuels our collective work for a world free of the injustice of proprietary software. And because of the benefits and resources FSF provides to associate members, you can be an even more active force in pushing software freedom forward. The support of our associate members allows us to continue to be the preeminent free licensing resource for free software developers through the FSF Free Software Licensing and Compliance Lab. This includes keeping the GNU project and the GNU General Public License (GPL) strong for software freedom. Our tech team provides the organization with its technical backbone, protects and maintains the infrastructure for the GNU project and other free software projects, and always works to maintain the current standard of software freedom and not let proprietary software sneak in through a backdoor. Want confirmed free (as in freedom) software? Use one of the thousands of free software packages in the Free Software Directory. And the campaigns team keeps our advocacy campaigns strong and responsive, navigating the many challenges we all face today. For example, our Right to Repair campaign targets the dangers (in this case, literal) of not being in control of the software behind self-driving cars, and our Surveillance campaign challenges the use of software that allows governments to trample people's civil liberties.

We can't live, work, or learn in freedom unless the software we use is free.

For as little as $12 USD a month ($6 USD for students), become part of a huge global community today by joining the FSF as an associate member before our January 16 deadline. Do you know someone who is passionate about promoting computer user freedom? You can gift them a membership. We also offer a friends-tier associate membership for those of you affected by economic challenges but who still want to support free software. FSF associate members help us take on the predatory proprietary software giants and their government allies, resisting their efforts to track and trap us inside their proprietary software cages. Associate members help us get closer to a free society. Join the FSF today and help us meet our goal! Free software in action open cage © 2020, Free Software Foundation, Inc., by Raghavendra Kamath. This image is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

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