[nmglug] FSF Associate Membership

[Sam Noble]

I did something I've wanted/meant to do for a long time last night.
I finally joined the Free Software Foundation as an associate member.

I've asked for it as a Christmas present several times, and somehow
instead of doing it myself when none of my loved ones took care of it
for me, I've just sat on my hands. :(

Anyway it's not expensive, ($12 a month) And Christmas evening with
Santa Cash in hand I finally made it happen.

And more excitingly than that, I came in this morning beaming about it
to my one co-worker who's in today (holiday skeleton crew and all.)

And before lunch he had signed up too!

If you haven't been keeping up on the FSF it's worth noting that 2006
brought quite a number of new initiatives to the organization. The
defective by design anti-DRM campaign. The newly launched badvista.org
highlighting the dangers of Trusted Computing, the new compliance lab
site, and of course the GPLv3 process just to name a few. And I for one
appreciate them taking on these new roles that make it clear that they
"do something" as I hope it will defray some of the perceptions I often
encounter that GNU and FSF are part of the 'past'. I'm sure you all have
encountered the same thing. GNU 'tools' as part of the 'Linux' backstory
and the like.

Anyway, fresh from the surprise of my co-worker signing up I thought I'd
see if I could spread the idea around a bit. It is like tax deductible
and stuff. :)
There's a year-end push going on if you hit www.fsf.org You can watch
Eben's appeal video and stuff. ( I might have this mirrored in the
download section at www.thepromisedlan.org later if you want to save
them the bandwidth, but as of this writing my toy CMS is kind of choking
on the upload.)

There's a referral program too, if you want to help me earn a
personalized RMS or Moglen voice mail message you can ID me #4914 as
your referrer when you sign up. Or you can use this link:
http://www.fsf.org/register_form?referrer=4914