Biography | Zoë Kooyman — The Friday Night the Franklin Street Office Closed to Visitors

People treat a nonprofit headquarters as a permanent address printed in a license header.

This one lasted nineteen years and ended on a Friday evening.

On 5 August 2024 the Free Software Foundation invited the public to 51 Franklin Street, fifth floor, for a move-out gathering on Friday 16 August from 18:00 to 20:30.

The Foundation had worked in that downtown Boston block since May 2005.

Staff would keep packing until 31 August.

After that date the organization went fully remote and took a postal box at 31 Milk Street.

Zoë Kooyman was executive director when the doors closed.

A contemporary report quoted her on the last public night and on the final staff day two weeks later.

The living-person rule here is simple: the words stay paraphrased.

What the pin records is the timetable the Foundation itself published.

The visitor who looks for 51 Franklin Street today will find a downtown building, not a shop with a GNU sticker in the window.

The fifth floor is no longer an office the public can walk into.

GPL notices that still carry this street number are out of date.

The Foundation said the move was meant to keep the advocacy work going without a Boston lease.

Whether that holds is a later story.

This memory stops at the last evening the address was open on purpose.

Photo: Ruben Rodriguez, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.