Dear Free Software Supporter,

Tomorrow we mark the end of our year-long celebration of the 25th anniversary of the GNU Project—a celebration that we kicked off in September 2008 with a wonderful video from author and comedian Stephen Fry.

Today, we celebrate the fact that we have passed 25,000 subscribers to our monthly newsletter, the Free Software Supporter, and we thank the 3,200 individuals who have joined the Free Software Foundation as Associate Members to fund our work. You can join their ranks now and become a proud card carrying member:

• Become an FSF Associate Member
• Give a gift of FSF Membership
• As a member use our widget to refer your friends
• Donate without membership

I am proud that the FSF has so many dedicated activists and members, who every day voice their support for our mission and advocate for a free society.

The free software movement has had an excellent year, and awareness of the ethical importance of free software is growing. Together, we are fighting the scourge of proprietary software, software patents, Digital Restrictions Management, and Treacherous Computing, in an effort to build a world of free software where we the users are free.

I could have made money [by joining the proprietary software world], and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place. — Richard Stallman, the GNU Project.

Help us cap a succesful year for GNU by joining as a member or donating, and thank you for your continued support!

Peter and the Free Software Foundation team.

Translations: Arabic

by Richard M. Stallman
President

I have said in speeches that Apple could forcibly impose software changes in Mac OS X, just as Microsoft can with Windows. I heard this in the Mac community, but there is no published information that confirms it, and I now believe that I was misinformed. There is no evidence that Apple has installed software changes without the user's permission.

We have no way to verify that there is no backdoor in Mac OS X that could install changes without permission, but that is no basis to claim there is one. I apologize for repeating a criticism of Mac OS which I cannot substantiate and must presume is false.

While Apple has not, it seems, imposed changes by force, it has a record of making users install harmful changes on pain of losing functionality, and misleading users about what these changes do.

In 2005, Apple made users install version 4.7 of iTunes in order to continue using the iTunes music store. This "upgrade" was billed by Apple as fixing a "security hole." What the update actually did was change the iTunes system of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) to make PyMusique stop working. PyMusique was free software that allowed GNU/Linux users to access the iTunes store. (See http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-03/22/content_2728356.htm and http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03/22/apple_blocks_pymusique/.)

Apple similarly imposed other incompatible iTunes changes later in 2005, and in 2006: users could not play music purchased using newer versions of iTunes in older versions of iTunes. So users had to update iTunes on all of their computers that they wanted to play their own music on, not just on the computer that they used to actually purchase the DRM-afflicted music. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairPlay.)

In 2008, Apple snuck a new DRM malfeature into Quicktime in an update advertised as adding a feature for renting movies. This malfeature stopped users from playing video files they themselves had made. (See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/26/quicktime_drm_cripples_adobe_programs/.)

If Mac OS X does not have a backdoor to forcibly install changes, that does not make it ethical. It has other malicious features, such as Digital Restrictions Management (see http://defectivebydesign.org/apple). What makes those malfeatures possible is that users can't remove them. Mac OS is proprietary software, so the users don't have control over it -- rather, the developer has sole control over the program, and employs it as an instrument of control over the users. So I don't withdraw my condemnation of Mac OS. But I do withdraw the claim that it has a known backdoor.

Gathered together on Saturday night was an impressive collection of coding and non-coding women, if I do say so myself! Mairin Duffy (Red Hat and Fedora), Leslie Hawthorn (Google), Adelaida McIntire (FSF Intern), Deborah Nicholson (FSF membership coordinator), Hillary Rettig (author of the Lifelong Activist), Christine Spang (MIT, Debian), Hanna Wallach (Debian Women, GNOME WSOP ), and Marina Zhurakhinskaya (GNOME WSOP) all arrived at the FSF office in time for a casual dinner. Then we settled down to business and Stormy Peters (GNOME CEO, via phone) called in to participate remotely.

Just a month ago we announced our intent to hold a summit to talk about the very important issue of of increasing women's participation in free software. Women account for less than 2% of our community and that's just no way to run a successful movement to empower users.

The mini-summit was also a kick-off for us here at the FSF to start building a campaign program that brings more women into the community. As of right now, the next event is planned to be in Boston about six months from now, co-located with this year's Libre Planet conference hosted by the FSF. We also hope that our work will help start a much larger conversation within the community and leave us all with the personal challenge to recruit our women friends, family members and colleagues into the movement.

The minutes and ideas we came up with are all documented here. Please take a look!

I'm sure you've been wondering: How can I get involved? First sign yourself up for the email discussion list, and the Free Software Supporter and then you may want to stop by to share ideas in #glofs on freenode.net

If you're ready, take a few minutes to talk to other people in your free software project about increasing women's participation in your endeavors -- you may find that you have colleagues who have been waiting for someone to start this conversation.

Thanks to everyone who participated and everyone who sent along encouragement, ideas, links and materials!

by Deborah Nicholson
Membership Coordinator

It was a nice, crisp fall day outside, but we had a great group of people gathered inside at Encuentro 5 in Chinatown for Boston's Software Freedom Day. There were talks on hacking your blog, women in free software, free software on mobile devices, and how free software economics works.

Here we see the FSF's licensing guru, Brett Smith, exercising his extremely speedy typing skills (QWERTY or Dvorak? You never know with Brett...) at the registration table.

Felicia was our first brand-new member of the day -- welcome aboard! (If Felicia's example inspires you, then you can sign yourself up online here.)

We caught Leslie Hawthorn engrossed, reading something -- later on she was part of the evening's mini-summit on Women in Free Software, held in the FSF offices just a few blocks away.

Walter Bender took us all on a whirlwind tour of the multi-layered Turtle program for kids, which is part of the Sugar operating system, and announced the good news that the portable version, called "Sugar on a Stick," can now run on top of Trisquel, a fully free GNU/Linux distribution.

FSF senior sysadmin Ward Vandewege breaks out the air quotes while talking with FSF executive director Peter Brown, and erstwhile volunteer Matthew Craig.

Sysadmin intern Bernie Innocenti was clearly missed by this past summer's campaigns intern, Adelaida McIntire, who came back to Boston just for the day's festivities.

Encuentro 5's bank of computers was available for anyone who wanted to check out Trisquel.

FSF board member Mako Hill allows the crowd to contemplate the GNU for a moment while he gets ready to show us another anti-feature; aka an unwanted feature that some proprietary software vendors use to get extra money out of their customers -- while thwarting their freedom.

In between speeches, people are pondering software freedom and/or waiting until the pizza line is a bit shorter.

RMS came by in the afternoon to cover what's on the horizon for user freedom. Here he stands with Bernie and Harley.

This was a great day in Boston! We'll have more media up from our event, including some audio and video, in the next few weeks. I hope your Software Freedom Day was as inspiring as ours.

See you next year!

P.S. Thanks so much to FSF directory maintainer Kelly Hopkins for taking pictures!

Congratulations to Osama Khalid (OsamaK) for being selected as the first ever GNU Generation member of the month! Osama speaks Arabic natively, and has been using this gift to help the free software community. He worked with projects including KDE and VLC this past month to translate popular applications into Arabic. As a FSF/GNU translator, he also recently translated Holmes Wilson's blog post on Ogg Theora.

Translation is especially important, because it makes the work of the free software community accessible to so many new people. With Osama's work, the world's Arabic-speaking population will gain the ability to use a computer in freedom.

Osama's contributions extend beyond translation, though. Osama feels very strongly about the free software values. He applies these values to everyday life by educating others in his local community about free software. If all free software users fully understood and promoted these values, the state of free software would be more powerful and influential than it is today.

In addition, Osama has stayed on both the GNU Generation and the Free Software Foundation IRC channels to help those that need it. He even volunteered to use his knowledge of the MediaWiki API and Python to write a script for GNU Generation.

Thank you to everyone who participated in GNU Generation last month. It was very difficult for the committee to pick the winner, as there were so many great contributions. Keep up the great work!

If you are aged approx. 13-18 and are interested in participating in GNU Generation, take a look at the announcement and the homepage.