It continued existing GNU projects such as the sale of manuals and tapes, and employed developers of the free software system.

[citation needed] In the interest of promoting copyleft assertiveness by software companies to the level that the FSF was already doing, in 2004 Harald Welte launched gpl-violations.org.

In late 2001, Bradley M. Kuhn (then executive director), with the assistance of Moglen, David Turner, and Peter T. Brown, formalized these efforts into FSF's GPL Compliance Labs.

[20] During 2003 and 2004, FSF put substantial advocacy effort into responding to the lawsuit and quelling its negative impact on the adoption and promotion of free software.

[23] Usually taught by Bradley M. Kuhn and Daniel Ravicher, these seminars offered CLE credit and were the first effort to give formal legal education on the GPL.

[29] In September 2019, Richard Stallman resigned as president of the FSF after pressure from journalists and members of the open source community in response to him making controversial comments in defense of Marvin Minsky on Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking scandal.

An abbreviation for "Hardware-Node", the h-node website lists hardware and device drivers that have been verified as compatible with free software.

[37][38][39] FSF sponsors a number of campaigns against what it perceives as dangers to software freedom, including software patents, digital rights management (which the FSF and others[40] have re-termed "digital restrictions management", as part of its effort to highlight technologies that are "designed to take away and limit your rights",[41]) and user interface copyright.

The FSF maintains a list of "high-priority projects" to which the Foundation claims that "there is a vital need to draw the free software community's attention".

[43] The FSF considers these projects "important because computer users are continually being seduced into using non-free software, because there is no adequate free replacement.

"[43] As of 2021, high-priority tasks include reverse engineering proprietary firmware, reversible debugging in GNU Debugger; developing automatic transcription and video editing software, Coreboot, drivers for network routers, a free smartphone operating system and creating replacements for Skype and Siri.

[44] The effort has been criticized by Michael Larabel for either not instigating active development or for being slow at the work being done, even after certain projects were added to the list.

Eben Moglen and Dan Ravicher previously served individually as pro bono legal counsel to the FSF.

After forming the Software Freedom Law Center, Eben Moglen continued to serve as the FSF's general counsel until 2016.

[73] Through the years the FSF has had its postal address, and until August 31st 2024 when going all remote its physical headquarters,[2] at different locations in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, as indicated in the table below.

[79] On June 16, 2010, Joe Brockmeier, a journalist at Linux Magazine, criticized the Defective by Design campaign by the FSF as "negative" and "juvenile" and not being adequate for providing users with "credible alternatives" to proprietary software.

"[81] In 2009, a license update of LibDWG/LibreDWG to version 3 of the GNU GPL made it impossible for the free software projects LibreCAD and FreeCAD to use LibreDWG legally.

[86] Several prominent organizations and individuals who develop free software objected to the decision, citing past writings on Stallman's blog which they considered antithetical to promoting a diverse community.