Large Language Models (LLMs) Externalise Their Cost to the Free Software Foundation (FSF)
"The forty-sixth Free Software Bulletin is now available online!"
"Have you ever spent a perfectly good summer staring down the barrel of a 10MB executable in a hex editor or mitigating Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks?" asked Dr. Miriam Bastian last week. "In the latest issue of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) Bulletin, you can learn why neither should be necessary. You can also read about the workings of social movements in our executive director's empowering call to speak up; discover how "no attribution" licenses hinder the goals of the free software movement, although they're free licenses; and understand how the use of free software in healthcare ensures freedom to healthcare workers and patients, increases transparency, builds trust with patients, and can reduce costs."
Here are some of the latest articles from the Free Software Foundation (FSF):
- How we never say "reject nonfree software" to shame you—but because we need your voice;
- Why you should choose programs released under a strong copyleft license instead of "no attribution" licenses;
- Why free software is not just a subculture for hobbyists and tinkerers, and how to reverse engineer a proprietary codebase for a medical console;
- How free software can mitigate some of the problems of the US healthcare system and make it stronger; and
- How the Savannah hackers mitigated DDoS attacks against GNU resources and the FSF infrastructure.
More recently Ian Kelling from the FSF's Board and the technical team also published: Our small team vs millions of bots
Quoting Kelling: "Our infrastructure has been under attack since August 2024. Large Language Model (LLM) web crawlers have been a significant source of the attacks, and as for the rest, we don't expect to ever know what kind of entity is targeting our sites or why."
Further down there are recent examples: "Furthermore, gnu.org and ftp.gnu.org were targets in a new DDoS attack starting on May 27, 2025. Its goal seems to be to take the site down. It is currently mitigated. It has had several iterations, and each has caused some hours of downtime while we figured out how to defend ourselves against it. Here again, the goal was likely to take our sites down and we do not know who or what is behind this. In addition, directory.fsf.org, the server behind the Free Software Directory, has been under attack since June 18. This likely is an LLM scraper designed to specifically target Media Wiki sites with a botnet. This attack is very active and now partially mitigated."
The FSF needs more resources. To quote: "Our full-time FSF tech staff is just two systems administrators, and we currently lack the funds to hire more tech staff any time soon. I know many of the readers support the free software movement in a variety of ways which we appreciate greatly, but in order to improve our staffing situation we need more associate members."
So far this summer they've reached about 50% of their funding goal.
4 years ago, around the time the Microsofters' SLAPPs began, somebody tricked the FSF's infrastructure to bomb me with literally thousands of E-mails. I never found out who did that, but it was likely retaliation for my support of the FSF's founder (the SLAPPers were busy defaming him and me). █