Transparency: FSFE financial reports exclude speaker fees and expenses

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 15, 2025

17:00 Tue, 14 Oct 2025

Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.

People have recently asked questions about a very large corporate donation to the FSFE misfits, that is, the fake FSF people.

People should not look at this money as new money. Many corporations have been participating in the FSFE Legal and Licensing Workshop (LLW) for years.

There are rumours that members of the FSFE General Assembly and/or staff members may have received personal reimbursement of travel expenses, benefits in kind and even speaker fees paid into personal bank accounts or their own private consultancy businesses.

The FSFE misfits have published a transparency commitment with reference to Transparency International Germany. Such commitments may look impressive but Transparency International appears to be a toothless tiger when policing those participants who are not formally on the payroll of the FSFE misfits.

Staff members would be expected to declare any benefits to their managers. Anybody else listed in the General Assembly page is not actually required to declare payments made through their personal bank accounts or companies they use for consulting fees.

Here is an email from Jonas Oberg, the last Executive Director. He resigned and the FSFE did not replace him.

Subject: Re: Save the date for GA 2017 (travel expenses)
Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2017 08:39:08 +0200
From: Jonas Oberg <jonas@fsfe.org>
To: Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.pro>
CC: ga@fsfeurope.org


Hi Daniel,


> Therefore, wouldn't it be wise to have a conflict of interest policy,
> explicitly request information about such things when it relates to
> something like the GA meeting?  This would be leading by example.


I'm quite sure the GA will be happy if someone provided such a policy to
agree on. In the mean time, I do think it's sensible for those having a
potential conflict of interest to declare it.


Shane already did so, and for myself, I'm still a member of the board for
Morus konsult AB, a (now largerly dormant) company I helped setup a few
years ago, and which does consulting on free software. It typically does
not lead to any conflict of interest situations so far.


-- 
Jonas Öberg, Executive Director
Free Software Foundation Europe | jonas@fsfe.org
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