Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project known by many in the open source worlds as rms, is not the sort of person you'd expect to endorse a product. But Stallman and the FSF have formed a partnership of sorts with Crowd Supply, a crowdfunding company that has been largely focused on open source hardware and software projects.

Crowd Supply is best known for launching the Librem laptop (a privacy-focused computer built by Purism) and the Novena (an open-hardware "laptop" designed by Andrew "bunnie" Huang and Sean "xobs" Cross). Based in Portland, Oregon, the company was founded by Joshua Lifton, a Ph D alumnus of MIT Media Lab and the former head of engineering at Puppet Labs. In addition to providing product designers with a crowdfunding platform, Crowd Supply also provides them with long-term sales, marketing, and fulfillment services.

The partnership with FSF was a natural fit, Lifton said in a statement on the arrangement. "The lines between hardware and software are blurring," Lifton explained. "It only makes sense to consider them jointly rather than separately.”

As part of the partnership, Crowd Supply has re-engineered its website and e-commerce software to be compliant with FSF's Free Javascript Campaign—an effort to get websites to adopt approaches that allow users to access them without running "non-free" software. Crowd Supply will also work with FSF in bringing more software and hardware products to market based on the FSF's core tenets, including the "four freedoms" of free software as defined on FSF's website:

The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).

The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).

The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

For its part, FSF is formally endorsing Crowd Supply as its preferred crowdfunding platform for free software and open (or "Libre") hardware projects, and it will steer developers of hardware and software projects to Crowd Supply when they are looking to fund or sell their own work (or purchase products themselves). Stallman said that FSF was happy to promote the site because it "respects people’s freedom while asking them to donate to projects."