The FreedomBox Foundation
What We Do
Founded in 2011 by Columbia Law School Professor Eben Moglen, the FreedomBox Foundation is a non-profit organization with 501(c)(3) status based in New York City that exists to support the development of FreedomBox and advocate for FreedomBox throughout the world. The FreedomBox Foundation would not exist without the generous donations of its supporters.
The FreedomBox software ecosystem is developed by a collaborative community of contributors across the globe. The FreedomBox Foundation plays a few important roles in this process. First, it provides technical infrastructure and resources to software developers, including hosting resources on our own servers. Second, it strategizes the future of FreedomBox by building partnerships and coordinating the activities of software developers. Third, it provides legal services and collects tax-deductible donations for FreedomBox. Lastly, the FreedomBox Foundation serves as the public face of FreedomBox by managing communications, marketing, and partnerships.
Why We Do It
As a non-profit organization with 501(c)(3) status, the FreedomBox Foundation does not seek to profit from the FreedomBox project. In fact, the FreedomBox system is free to download. Our goal is to make freedom on the internet reproducible by anyone in the world.
Great privacy technology already exists. But using it requires technical skills beyond those of most activists, journalists, scholars, and ordinary people. That’s a problem we're trying to solve with FreedomBox: we arrange a lot of complicated software into a simple user interface that can be used by almost anyone. From villages in rural India to dorms at American universities, our user community is large. But we want to make it even larger because the public still feels hopeless about data scandals, cyberattacks, and surveillance. By developing and advocating for FreedomBox, the Foundation aims to restore hope in a free and open internet and reaffirm the primacy of user rights, one user at a time.
Who’s Doing It
The FreedomBox Foundation is led by its President, Eben Moglen (Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and founder of the Software Freedom Law Center), and Member of the Board Yochai Benkler (Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society).