by Max Shinn
FSF Campaigns Intern

I am very excited to announce that I will be interning with the Free Software Foundation this summer. Since I am going into my junior year of high school, the FSF has assigned me a project that is long overdue: figuring out a way to get young people involved in Free Software.

Had it not been for good luck, I would have never discovered the world of Free Software in the first place. I found the “Linux Operating System” in 7th grade. I installed Debian (Ubuntu didn't have a “newbie-friendly” reputation yet) on an old computer and played around. I was amazed that such a great free-of-cost operating system had been built; however, I was much more amazed that nobody knew anything about it. I wanted to know why.

Fortunately for me, in 8th grade, my history teacher let me research the history of “Linux” for a major, several month long, research project. I was completely amazed by what I learned. I learned that the GNU Project is the basis for what is really the GNU/Linux operating system. I learned that "Open Source" is different than "Free Software." I learned that one could experience freedom in computing through software choice. I learned that proprietary software companies use FUD to keep free software from seeing the light of day in many situations. I learned that Linus Torvalds isn't the sole creator of an entire operating system. Most importantly, though, I learned that this was something I wanted to be a part of. By the end of the school year, my computer was equipped with the newly released Debian 4.0.

Had I not completed this in-depth research project, though, I would have never discovered the benefits of Free Software. People take what they are given unless inspired or compelled to do otherwise. I had that compulsion: curiosity, and a big chunk of time to satisfy that curiosity. Most people, especially students, don't have the luxuries of time and curiosity that I had. Without someone or something inspiring them to redefine their digital ethics, today's youth will remain loyal to the corporations that punish them for doing so.

Coincidentally, though, most would agree that young people are the single most important link in the Free Software movement. The next generation carries upon its shoulders not only the future of free software, but also the future of the world. The stereotypical high school graduation speeches about changing the world have serious real-life relevance. With nothing more than new ideas and values, the next generation collectively can very easily change the course of history. History has shown that one nice thing about young people is their general openness to new or nontraditional ideas. It is ironic to mention that in this context, though, because when it was first introduced, proprietary software was very unorthodox. The young generation embraced the concept of limiting access to knowledge as a natural law. Now, it seems to have become natural law.

The line has to be drawn somewhere. Microsoft's genius business strategy of targeting the young generation has seen unbelievable success. The challenge for the Free Software community is to accomplish what Microsoft and other proprietary software companies accomplished through the use of morals instead of money.

We have to start somewhere. I am among those who like to have an extremely detailed plan in place before starting anything, so I will hopefully have a detailed plan in place before diving into physical work. My final plan will center around three main objectives. These are the “Three C's,” a process that will enable young people to become active members of the Free Software community.

    1. Come – Young people with all experience levels will be invited
       into the Free Software community. They will learn about free
       software, GNU, and the pieces of history essential to
       understanding the Free Software movement.

    2. Connect – These young people will join a micro-community
       environment that promotes the use of Free Software and GNU/Linux,
       and helps bridge the gap for these new members of the worldwide
       Free Software community. When making decisions, most people rank
       social considerations highly. A comforting environment of
       similarly minded individuals will make the journey into a new
       philosophy on software seem less daunting.

    3. Contribute – Young people have a massive amount of power. They
       will have an easier time becoming contributors for Free Software
       projects through this micro-community than they would on their
       own. This micro-community will provide outlets to make it easy to
       contribute to Free Software. Advocacy will take a high priority,
       because it is one of, if not the most important type contribution.
       They will learn that their talents can be used to foster free
       software.

I have a huge journey ahead of me this summer. I hope that, through this project, I may give direction to those young people interested in free software. I will be sure to post as frequently as is practical to keep anyone interested informed. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to email me at max@fsf.org

Happy Hacking!

by Sarah Adelaida McIntire
FSF Campaigns Intern

I am one of the Free Software Foundation's newest interns, which is a little surprising because less than a year ago, I didn't even know what an operating system was. While interning here, I hope to help myself and others to become more educated about free software. I also hope to introduce free software as something that is very accessible, easy to use, and most importantly, as something that does not restrict users' freedoms.

As I mentioned earlier, I did not know what an operating system was less than a year ago, so as you probably can guess, free software and the ideas behind the Free Software Foundation are also fairly new to me. Actually, the term "free software" wasn't even in my vocabulary last October. Basically, the only word in my vocabulary even remotely surrounding free software was "Linux". I only attributed "Linux" to something that was impossibly hard to understand and used by angry techno geeks. I knew these "geeks" using Linux hated Microsoft. I could not understand this. Microsoft is everywhere, so why would anyone hate Microsoft? I thought it worked well enough.

After being introduced to a few GNU/Linux users, my views on Microsoft inevitably changed and my vocabulary was expanded after they gave me many thorough explanations of the reasons for the creation of GNU, the ideas the Free Software Foundation supports, and the problems proprietary software has created. After discovering this, I made a hesitant switch to GNU/Linux. I was afraid that because of my lack of computer skills, I was not going to be able to figure out how to use my computer, mess it all up, and not be able to take it back to the store for repair because removing Microsoft from my computer might waive my warranty.

To my great surprise, none of my fears were realized. I actually found that Ubuntu was easier to use than my old operating system, Vista. It had a cleaner interface, hardly ever crashed, and an incredible amount of benefits that were never offered by my old operating system. I was hooked and realized that my old stereotyped notions of GNU/Linux users were unfounded.

After learning about how proprietary software restricts my freedoms, and realizing that I am actually able to use free software, despite my painfully limited computer skills, I of course wanted to spread this information to others. This wish to help spread the knowledge of how our freedoms are restricted by proprietary software is how I found my way to an internship at the Free Software Foundation.

A lot of people, just like me less than a year ago, are completely ignorant of an alternative to proprietary software. Also, the level of general awareness about how our freedoms are restricted needs to change or else we will find ourselves cornered, and our freedoms limited even further. I hope I will be able to reach out to those who think, just as I did less than a year ago, that free software is not something just for techno geek geniuses. That it's not necessary to understand how a computer runs in order to use an operating system that does not restrict one's freedoms. That it is possible to understand how proprietary software restricts one's freedoms with basically no background in computers. It is my hope that I will relate to the computer user.

It is vitally important for our future, not only individually, but communally and culturally, to spread awareness about free software and the ideas motivating the Free Software Foundation. As an intern here, I will hopefully help raise awareness about the freedoms proprietary software restricts to a wider audience, while learning more about free software myself. The freedoms that are being stripped away from users are too great for so many people to continue to remain ignorant. I do not want to see my, or anyone else's freedoms restricted any longer.

I'll be helping out with FSF campaigns like LibrePlanet and Defective by Design. If you have ideas for how we can better reach out to people along the lines I've described, please write to me at campaigns@fsf.org.

(You can improve, translate, download, share and purchase a copy of the book via http://shop.fsf.org/product/Introduction_to_Command_Line/.)

by Adam Hyde
Founder, FLOSS Manuals

Recently we had the pleasure to collaborate with the FSF on a Book Sprint at the LibrePlanet event in Boston. We are a relatively young organization and so this was a great opportunity for us to be welcomed into the FSF community and be given the thumbs up by the people that created the free software movement.

You probably haven't heard of a "Book Sprint," although you may be familiar with the idea of code sprints. Book Sprints are essentially the same idea but we create an entire manual about free software in five days flat. Sound crazy?! Well, every time we start a sprint I also think it's a crazy idea, but it's now something we have a lot of experience in, and it's getting clearer how to really work this process and get the most out of it.

Since it was an FSF collaboration, we took the opportunity to commit to writing a GNU/Linux command line manual for newbies. Andy Oram, a long time FLOSS Manuals contributor, made an outline for the manual and we structured this with our online platform.

Just to make it more interesting, we committed to writing the book in two days! I didn't think too much about it. If I had, I wouldn't have done it!

It really was a bit crazy to think we could do this -- all previous sprints had been a full five days and even that is an audacious task. The publishing industry typically takes 6-12 months to produce similar material. Thats why I felt thinking about the task ahead wasn't such a good idea.

To help out, as planned, a few days prior to the event, the FSF sent out a press release to its members saying what we were up to. Overnight we had 130 new registrations, which was an increase of 25% of our membership base. For a youngish organization like us, this was an enormous boost.

The day of the sprint came and Andy and I met at the venue hoping to be met at the sprint space by a small percentage of our new membership -- 0%, to be precise -- everyone was at the conference (of course!). Oh no! Could Andy and I write the book ourselves in two days? Thankfully we had no reason to panic, as in virtual space we were working online with about twelve others. These contributors were mostly new members, and it is a tribute to the FLOSS Manuals tool set (a product of the hard work by Aleksandar Erkalovic and Lotte Meijer) that there were few questions on how to use the editing system -- people just got to it and wrote. By closing time -- 5pm -- on the first day, we had about 30% of the manual done! Great! Still, we had 70% to go and only 50% of the time left.

The next morning I got up and checked the manual and another three chapters had been completed overnight! Cool. I love geeks that just get to it and collaborate.

We worked through Sunday with four or five people jumping into the real space. The result was that at 6pm, as planned, we pushed the "publish" button, and uploaded our manual to a print on demand service. 6pm the second day, and the beautiful book was available to anyone to buy (the manuals are also always available for free in HTML from the FLOSS Manuals Web site).

It was a fantastic experience. We produced a remarkable book in two days, which is available for purchase from the FSF. All proceeds are going towards more FLOSS Manuals/FSF Book Sprints on free software. So buy the book, give it to a newbie, and help contribute to curing the lack of quality free documentation about free software.

http://flossmanuals.net/

This provides a great new tool that developers can use to raise awareness about the free software license they use for their work, and that users can use to find the software they're looking for. Here I'll go over the technical details of how it works, and then explain how developers can use and benefit from it.

A Way-Too-Brief Overview of RDF

The Resource Description Framework, or RDF for short, is a data model for metadata. You're probably already familiar with metadata from your music library. Many popular audio formats like Ogg Vorbis and FLAC let people store metadata about the song in the file: what the song's title is, who wrote the song, who performed it, and so on. These formats generally have their own specialized method of saving metadata directly inside the audio file. RDF, however, offers a general framework for providing metadata about anything.

Because it's so flexible, RDF doesn't have any built-in vocabulary. By itself, it doesn't know how to say that Beethoven wrote his Symphony No. 9; people who want to use RDF to indicate this have to define a vocabulary that describes the relationship themselves. For a long time, Creative Commons has published such a vocabulary for licenses, and used it to offer RDF metadata for the Creative Commons licenses. This metadata briefly describes what the license allows the licensee to do, and what major conditions it places on a licensee. This is not a complete description—or even a thorough summary—of the license's terms, and it's not intended to be. Instead, it's simply meant to highlight the license terms that people are most likely to care about when they're looking for work that they can incorporate into their own projects.

We've used Creative Commons' vocabulary as much as possible to describe our own licenses. The couple of additional terms we needed have been added to their documentation. Thanks to this, it should be very easy for software that works with Creative Commons' license metadata in some way to also handle ours. It's theoretically possible that some of this software can work with the new GNU license metadata without being changed at all.

How To Take Advantage Of This

If you've published a work under one of the GNU licenses, the easiest way to get the most benefit from this metadata is to put a clear license link on your project's web page. Here's an example of how to do this:

Foobar is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the <a
href="http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html" rel="license">GNU
General Public License</a> as published by the Free Software
Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option)
any later version.

Of course, you should adapt this text as appropriate for your project. There are two key points to bear in mind when you provide the link:

• Make sure you include the rel="license" attribute in your license link. Software that crawls the web looking to associate works with specific licenses looks for a link like this first and foremost. This will ensure that they pair your project with the right license.

• If you want to link to a specific version of one of our licenses, please be sure to use one of our stable license links.

Links like this will set the stage for people to develop tools that use all this metadata to provide useful information to others. In the future, someone who's working on an LGPL-covered library will be able to search for other LGPL-covered code all over the web that can help make the job easier. Or a writer who wants to make documentation for a program will be able to search for a manual published under the FDL that they can use as a starting point. The possibilities are endless, but first we need authors and developers to publish this information. Next time you update your project's web site, make sure it has a license link like this—then you'll be ready when new tools arrive to make use of it.

by John Sullivan
Operations Manager

It was unfortunately reported yesterday by a number of sources (including one pointed to by the New York Times) that Amazon had released the source code for the software running on the Kindle DX.

1) Yes, there is an Amazon page offering source code for software used on the Kindle. This isn’t all of the Kindle source code. It’s a selection released in order to comply with the license requirements of the code originally written by other people (like the GNU Project) which Amazon modified for its own purposes. It’s good that Amazon is complying with the licenses and not behaving illegally, but this is hardly something praiseworthy. Amazon benefited from the freedoms passed on to them by other free software authors, and that benefit comes with an obligation to convey that same freedom to their users -- to share alike.

2) Sadly, because the Kindle is afflicted with Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), the source code release doesn't help users improve their Kindle. Yes, you can look at Amazon’s changes and in theory you can make further improvements to code that could run on the Kindle. That would be awesome — except that Amazon has tivoized the Kindle, blocking your ability to put modified code back on your own device. Doing so requires circumventing part of their DRM system, which could earn you criminal prosecution under the DMCA. If Amazon were actually respecting its users, it would not prevent you from loading modified software onto your own device. Look but don’t touch is the message here.

3) What’s not released is significant — the code, for example, that allows Amazon to arbitrarily disable the Text to Speech feature whenever they want, remotely. Code that gives them significant power over users and how we can access books (in ways that have nothing to do with actual copyright law) remains secret.

So, the Kindle is still defective by design, and is still a tivoized computer running proprietary software. You can help by correcting this inaccurate story where you see it, and by writing to Amazon to let them know that they should remove the DRM from the Kindle and start treating their users with respect.