"This was originally posted 13 years ago today by John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Over the years, I came to appreciate a number of organizations that although not directly linked to free software and open source are of interest to the FOSS community. Pretty much everybody knows the free software foundation, the software freedom law center, the Linux foundation, The GNU project, the open source initiative, Creative Commons or Groklaw.

"It's an end of year tradition for non-profit organizations to do big fund-raising and membership pushes. As I mentioned several days ago, I am personally giving to two organizations this year: the Wikimedia Foundation and the Free Software Foundation..."

Groups that campaign for free technology, like the Free Software Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tend to be supported primarily by technologists. Both groups have struggled to communicate their messages to non-geeks.

"...Twenty-five years ago on September 27, 1983, I announced a plan to create a completely free operating system called GNU —- for 'GNU is not Unix' -- there are many ways you can help GNU and free software. One basic way is to join the Free Software Foundation as an Associate Member. -- Richard Stallman ..."

Shuttleworth, the head of Ubuntu confirmed spyware will be included in the Ubuntu default install also in the future. Partners receiving the data include Amazon and Facebook. The privacy concerns brought up by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) are ignored. Time to say goodbye to Ubuntu.

With the Software Freedom Day fast approaching, the Free Software Foundation and communities across the world are planning their activities and are preparing to celebrate and promote Free Software in their region.

"...Free software is software that gives you the user the freedom to share, study and modify it. We call this free software because the user is free. To use free software is to make a political and ethical choice asserting the right to learn, and share what we learn with others. Free software has become the foundation of a learning society where we share our knowledge in a way that others can build upon and enjoy..."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), in collaboration with the Tor Project, has launched an official 1.0 version of HTTPS Everywhere, a tool for the Firefox web browser that helps secure web browsing by encrypting connections to more than 1,000 websites.