Does the FSF use YouTube?

by Free Software Foundation Contributions — Published on Aug 25, 2017 05:57 PM

For the most part, the FSF avoids using YouTube.

Neither the Free Software Foundation, nor the GNU Project, nor Richard Stallman use YouTube. We do not have official YouTube accounts.

There are two major issues with YouTube as a place to share or view videos:

Normal use of YouTube requires nonfree software: YouTube uses HTML5, and requires you to run nonfree JavaScript in order to view videos. For some videos, it also requires the nonfree Adobe digital restrictions management (DRM) software that has been very unfortunately incorporated into many Web browsers.
YouTube tries to stop people from downloading copies of videos. The nonfree JavaScript code for some YouTube videos does not allow the browser to save a copy, and this is a form of DRM.

Instead, we recommend using GNU MediaGoblin. Check out the FSF's MediaGoblin instance! You can run your own instance, or create an account on one of these public servers. Additionally, RMS's speeches and other GNU-related talks can be found here.

You can also use a program like ytdl to download and watch videos posted on YouTube without proprietary JavaScript.

Image under CC BY-SA 4.0 by Christopher Webber