(Please don't let the thought of supporting us encourage you to start using a credit card if you don't already, or discourage you from buying anonymously with big-brother-resistant cash.)

Funds from our new credit card program will help support the mission of the FSF to preserve, protect and promote the freedom to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer software, and to defend the rights of free software users.

If you use a credit card, sign up for the Free Software Foundation Visa Platinum Rewards Card and support the FSF with every purchase. There's a $50 donation to the FSF by the bank when you first use the card, plus ongoing contributions of 30 basis points or .3% of retail transactions. US residents only. More details about the card.

...a contest, too

The current FSF credit card has the "floating gnu" on it. We're looking to offer other card designs, designs that reflect, in some visual way, the activist spirit of the FSF and its supporters.

Pleas submit photos and artwork. They can be original, or links to public domain images on the net. By sending the image, you also agree to make it available as CC-BY. If we choose your image for the cards, we'll send you the t-shirt of your choice from the FSF store.

Send them as SVG, JPEG, or PNG, in the best quality you can manage, to campaigns@fsf.org.

If the image is from the web, send a link, with a link to the license info. Note: If you send artwork, don't include any text. We know that's annoying, but it complicates things for a few reasons. Also, I won't be able to get back to all of you individually, so thanks in advance for your help, and good luck!

Version 2.3 of gNewSense, one of the the FSF-endorsed free GNU/Linux distributions, was released last month. Anyone interested in keeping pace with the latest improvements in free operating systems should check it out. It's based on Ubuntu, but without the non-free parts that Ubuntu includes by default, or suggests that you download.

If you were already using gNewSense 2.x, you can update to 2.3 with a standard system update.

As with other 2.x releases, this gNewSense release is available as a live cd for x86 (i386) systems, using GNOME as the default desktop environment (others such as XFCE or KDE are available post installation).

Download links:

• Live CD

• Torrent

For a more complete list of updates, read the full release announcement.

Thanks to Karl Goetz for coordinating this release! Stop by #gnewsense on irc.freenode.net to congratulate him and the team or get help with your new gNewSense install. And if you have some time to give back, please consider becoming a contributor to help make the next release even better.

The League for Programming Freedom, "an organization that opposes software patents and user interface copyrights" founded by Richard Stallman in 1989, is back and open for membership.

From their recent announcement:

We are pleased to announce the return of the League for Programming Freedom, the membership organization founded by Richard Stallman two decades ago to fight against software patents and user interface copyright. The LPF has been dormant since 1996, but we have completed all the legal paperwork necessary to exercise the full abilities of a 501(c)(4) non-profit tax-exempt corporation. Thanks to the stewardship of Treasurer Aubrey Jaffer, we have funds to get things going again.

Hi, my name is Tal Schechter, and I am the new campaigns intern at the FSF for the Fall of 2009. I am currently enrolled full-time at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, as a third-year student concentrating in science communication and ancient Jewish text scholarship. I have been playing with computers since my parents got an Apple II Classic in the early nineties. Questions of "Tal, why does this not work anymore?" were soon to follow. Finally, at 13, I broke away from Macs, with the first PC to enter the household. Both before and after the new PC, I had been going to computer camp, where I had first heard about Ubuntu, Gentoo, and other things people called "Linux."

An avid "Linux" user for some time, it was not until my first year of college that I encountered the concept of GNU/Linux and free software as different from open source. With the aid of the GLUG there, I learned about the importance of the user's freedoms. While I had been aware of the openness of the operating system I was using, it was not until I learned about the freedom aspects of free software that I was propelled into a proactive projection to convince other people that GNU/Linux is a better choice of operating system for them from moral, ethical, social, and economic standpoints.

At this point in time, I reach out to both avid computer users and to those who feel they don't know anything about computers, to try and educate them about the merits of using free software. As a person concentrating in science communication, I am concerned with the lack of lay explanations of free software. I hope that in my work as an intern at the FSF and beyond, I will help to explain the importance of user freedom to everyone, regardless of prior computer knowledge.

Even though sharing knowledge is one of the most basic principles of science, and even though much scientific research is funded by public institutions or universities, the vast majority of scientific papers end up in inaccessible troves controlled by private journals. AcaWiki is a brand new project to change that, using free sotfware and with freely licensed contributions.

From their announcement: "Currently, it can cost up to $35 to download an academic paper—a significant cost, especially because thorough research on any topic usually entails downloading many papers. AcaWiki’s approach takes advantage of the fact that copyright does not apply to ideas, only to the written expression of those ideas. Scholars can thus post summaries of their or others’ research online as long as they are not copying verbatim beyond what fair-use laws permit."

In other words, scholars can now access long, meticulously detailed summaries of the articles they're interested in. Summaries can be written by any community member with access to the original article, or by the original team of researchers themselves. Even if academics face strong incentives or requirements to publish in private journals, nothing in copyright law prohibits them from republishing a summary elsewhere.

AcaWiki is built on Semantic MediaWiki, which is free software available under the GNU GPL (it's the same software the FSF uses for LibrePlanet). But beyond just using free software, AcaWiki takes a free software approach: rather than waiting for journals make papers more available, they're organizing a community of experts to build a free equivalent that will be just as useful to students and scholars.

If you'd like to be an advocate for AcaWiki in your institution, or help summarize key papers in your field of expertise, get involved.

In a related story about people making progress against limits on the sharing of ideas, see the FSF's amicus brief in the Supreme Court "Bilski" case.