FSF Announces New President

In 2019, Richard Stallman stepped down as president of FSF. Stallman had made a poorly judged and perhaps poorly understood email comment in the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the alleged sex trafficker, which led to a flood of stories about his treatment of women. Stallman also resigned from his position at MIT as a result [9].

Almost a year later, the FSF announced that Geoffrey Knauth [10], a long-time board member and friend of Stallman, would be its next president. The announcement offers a new start to the organization and perhaps a chance to re-establish its leadership in the community. However, several months later, Knauth specifically and the Foundation in general remains mostly quiet.

LibreOffice vs. Apache OpenOffice

LibreOffice might well be the most common application on the Linux desktop. No other free office suite comes close to offering its feature set. Just as importantly, with this year's 7.0 release, it can claim to be the most feature-rich office productivity suite on any platform.

However, LibreOffice forked from its predecessor OpenOffice.org (now Apache OpenOffice) with considerable animosity on both sides. In 2020, on the 20th anniversary of the release of the shared code, The Document Foundation, which oversees LibreOffice, suggested an end to the feud [11]. Each project could offer what the other could not: OpenOffice the name recognition, and LibreOffice the funds and developers. Sadly, the response on the Apache OpenOffice mailing list was uniformly hostile, so this pointless duplication of effort is going to continue.

The Fight Against COVID-19

With free software already in a strong position to wait out the pandemic, many projects are spending the pandemic looking for ways to assist in the crisis. Debian Med has been particularly active, holding an online "BioHackathon" in the spring; it also continues to develop its biology and medical packages and to produce automated biomedical workflows using the Common Workflow Language. Countless others have experimented with using 3D printing to improve the availability of medical supplies. During 2020, academic projects for modeling like Nextstrain and CHIME also contributed to vaccine research. Moreover, Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company that produced the first vaccine, released some of its code early in the pandemic – a move which probably contributed to the early arrival of the vaccines.

Most of these efforts have received little publicity. However, they are proof (if any is needed) that the spirit of volunteerism that launched the free software community remains both active and efficient.