The BLF (aka Brother Liberation Front) is a group of freedom hackers, dedicated to develop krafty software which is free and open source.

The BLF firmly believes that anyone who owns a crafting machine should have the freedom to link it up to a computer and control it, without the need to spend a fortune on extra software.

The BLF is currently working on four projects

The goal of the Open Craft Database is to liberate crafters from the Craftocracy of Evil.

A plugin for the imaging programm the Gimp - which can read and write various knitting and cross-stitch pattern formats, including Brother disk image files, and Designaknit Patterns.

A suite of plugins for the vector graphics program Inkscape which will be able to:

• import embroidery file formats such as PES
• digitize shapes, contours and fonts into stitch sequences
• export embroidery file formats

A modular java based FB-100 floppy disk emulator, that can be used to control brother knitting machines via the serial or usb port. This module may be integrated with various other projects like the Processing programming environment.

Sconklin at Antitronics is working on hacking interfaces to Brother machines. He created PDDemulate – a free and open source FB-100 emulator written in Python.

Any relation of the term Brother in BLF to the name of any big company (like Brother Inc) is purely coincidential, though conspiracy theories supporting this claim are always welcome.