The Free Software Foundation is the nonprofit organization founded by Richard M. Stallman in 1985 to promote and defend free software — software that users can run, study, modify, and redistribute freely. The FSF developed the GNU General Public License (GPL), the foundational copyleft license, and maintains the GNU Project, the userland that combined with the Linux kernel to create GNU/Linux.
The FSF's philosophical framework is a deep influence on Doctorow's thinking, particularly the argument that software freedom is a prerequisite for user autonomy and that proprietary software is a form of power asymmetry. The GPL's mechanism — using copyright law to guarantee freedom rather than restrict it — is an instance of self-help-ip, the same technique creative-commons applied to creative works.
Doctorow's critique of digital-rights-management-critique draws directly from the FSF's longstanding opposition to DRM, which the organization calls "Digital Restrictions Management." His arguments about adversarial-interoperability and competitive-compatibility also echo FSF principles: that users should be able to make their tools work together regardless of what vendors prefer.
The FSF's conflicts with the w3c over the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) standard — where the W3C approved a DRM standard despite FSF objections — illustrate the tensions Doctorow writes about between open standards bodies and proprietary platform interests. The FSF's principled opposition to EME represents a stance Doctorow has supported and documented.