Some "patrons" do not age well...

Summary: As recently noted here, bagging a lot of money from large corporations (not individual members) is a risky move; it's what killed the OSI and made the so-called 'Linux' Foundation obsolete (habitual lobby against the interests of Linux)

WHILE looking back at the history of the FSF's Web site I stumbled upon lots of interesting things, such as "bkuhn" (later SFC) and "greve" (FSFE founder) editing the FSF's front page/homepage more than two decades ago; prior to that it was "rms".

The FSF's corporate sponsorship program started more than a decade and a half ago. In retrospect, this page from 2006 is interesting (July 15^th, 2006; months before the Novell/Microsoft deal or when they were already negotiating their patent collusion). From what we can gather, that was about a year after the programme had started. Up until then the FSF relied on awards (grants) received by the founder and then members. Wikipedia notes that: "On November 25, 2002, the FSF launched the FSF Associate Membership program for individuals."

Novell was an FSF sponsor ("patron") the year it was flirting with Microsoft and scheming to undermine the GPLv2 using software patents. Novell would later pay the EFF for "patent busting" to in a failed bid to appease critics of the "deal" (collusion). What's interesting though is that Novell gave money to the FSF and yet the FSF immediately spoke out against Novell's "deal"; but such conflicts of interest did occasionally cause trouble and, charting Linux Foundation territories/waters, this can lead to trouble. ⬆