Facing the Future

Zoe Kooyman is now running the Free Software Foundation. People I know and trust say she’s a good choice.

She had better be. She’s walking into a Category 5 hurricane.

The problem starts with DeepSeek. The Chinese LLM is available as open source under the MIT License. That’s different from the GPL, but Kooyman made clear the FSF is now aligned with the mainstream free software movement.

The issue is freedom. To review, FSF defines four freedoms. Freedom to download software, freedom to use it, freedom to change it, and freedom to share the changes. The GPL that the FSF wrote is different than other open source licenses, which define this fourth freedom as the freedom to profit from your improvements.