Why the Free Software Foundation (FSF) Owning or Renting Office Space Mattered
HAVING just mentioned the finances (purely fiscal aspect) involved with the office shutdown at the Free Software Foundation (FSF), consider a recent message from an FSF supporter. "The free software foundation is closing its doors at the end of the month," she told us, "likely you have heard."
Yes, that was weeks ago.
"I’m gonna try to swing this because it’s the fsf closing their doors… At least their physical location..."
Another person said, by means of analogy, that another known (but redacted) institution "is relatively old. It survived a couple of really dry periods and hard times when cooperatives, and especially the ideology behind them, passed out of fashion for a while. There had been many more similar institutions which had been far more dedicated and/or radical but they all vanished. Pretty much the sole reason was that they owned their own property so closing the doors was not as simple as stopping to write checks."
"Without owning its own office space, the FSF can easily succumb to hard times, it's just matter of stopping writing checks and then packing up a few boxes. And without even renting, it becomes as simple as not getting around to logging in. In the long term, the FSF needs to own its future office space, but then the deadly risk is that the property ownership becomes the end goal rather than software freedom." █