June
Issue 15, June 2009
Welcome to the Free Software Supporter, the Free Software Foundation's monthly news digest and action update -- being read by you and 20485 other activists.
Encourage your friends to subscribe and help us build an audience by adding our subscriber widget to your web site.
- Subscribe: http://www.fsf.org/free-software-supporter
- Widget: http://www.fsf.org/associate/widget
Miss an issue? You can catch up on back issues at http://www.fsf.org/free-software-supporter.
Multilingual? Send translations of the Supporter to campaigns@fsf.org.
- FSF welcomes AdBard network for free software advertising
- FSF Settles Suit Against Cisco
- War on Sharing: RIAA moves to block new FSF court brief
- Introducing RDF for GNU Licenses
- No, Amazon did not release all of the Swindle's source code
- Microsoft Office tries to break ODF
- FSF at the Connecticut Film Festival
- Help rewrite Canada's copyright law
- New Zealand in urgent danger of software patents
- Introduction to the Command Line
- GNU spotlight with Karl Berry
- Richard Stallman's speaking schedule and other FSF events
- Take action with the FSF!
FSF welcomes AdBard network for free software advertising
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today welcomed the launch of AdBard a new advertising network for technology based websites based upon the promotion of free, libre and open source software (FLOSS) friendly products and services.
The AdBard Network has been created by Tag1 Consulting to serve websites dedicated to free software ideals, helping them connect with companies selling products and services targeting a FLOSS audience. AdBard solves the problem that more generic advertising has led to the display of proprietary software products on sites that otherwise promote computer user freedom.
FSF Settles Suit Against Cisco
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and Cisco Systems, Inc. are pleased to announce that they have reached a joint agreement.
Cisco has agreed to appoint a Free Software Director for Linksys, a subsidiary of Cisco, to supervise Linksys' compliance with the requirements of free software licenses such as the GPL (the GNU General Public License). The Free Software Director will report periodically to the FSF regarding Linksys' compliance efforts. Cisco has further agreed to take certain steps to notify previous recipients of Linksys products containing FSF programs of their rights under the GPL and other applicable licenses, to publish a licensing notice on the Linksys website, and to provide additional notices in a separate publication. In addition, Cisco will continue to make the complete and corresponding source code for versions of FSF programs used with current Linksys products freely available on its website. Cisco will also make a monetary contribution to the FSF.
War on Sharing: RIAA moves to block new FSF court brief
While we were publishing our response to the RIAA's recent attack on the merit of organizations who represent the public's interest filing informative briefs in cases that threaten to negatively affect the public's interest, the RIAA was attacking us again.
Introducing RDF for GNU Licenses
For the past few months, the Compliance Lab has been working with Creative Commons on a new project, and it's just been released. I'm happy to announce that Resource Description Framework (RDF) metadata now accompanies all of the GNU licenses.
No, Amazon did not release all of the Swindle's source code
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. Not all of the Kindle source code was released. 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. The Kindle is afflicted with Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) and is tivoized, blocking your ability to put modified code back on your own device.
Microsoft Office tries to break ODF
Just a quick update to our OpenDocument campaign, with news that Microsoft Office has added support for ODF, but in a state that leaves it incompatible with every other ODF capable application out there, including OpenOffice.org and KOffice.
FSF at the Connecticut Film Festival
On June 6th, FSF's John Sullivan gave a workshop titled "Copyleft and the War on Sharing" at the Connecticut Film Festival in Danbury, CT. There was a discussion about the history and experience of GNU, the FSF, and the free software movement; and about some of the different fronts in the War on Sharing that is being waged against the public by groups like the RIAA, MPAA, BSA, Microsoft, and Apple.
Help rewrite Canada's copyright law
The Globe and Mail has put C-61, a bill to reform Canadian copyright law, on a wiki for editing. This is a great opportunity to remove the bad parts of the bill, and to guide the reform efforts toward something sane and consistent with free software principles.
New Zealand in urgent danger of software patents
The New Zealand government has proposed allowing unlimited software patenting. They are accepting comments until July 2nd, but participation from the people who will be harmed seems very low. The details of how to participate can be found on swpat.org:
Introduction to the Command Line
Over the course of two days, the FSF and FLOSS Manuals collaborated together on a Book Sprint at the LibrePlanet event in Boston. Together, and with the help of many contributors, a new textbook entitled "Introduction to the Command Line" was produced for GNU/Linux newbies to learn how to use the command line.
GNU Spotlight with Karl Berry
Updated GNU packages for this month:
autogen-5.9.8 automake-1.11 coreutils-7.4 ed-1.3 freeipmi-0.7.9 glibc-2.10.1 gmp-4.3.1 gnun-0.3 gnuradio-3.2 libmicrohttpd-0.4.2 libtasn1-2.2 ocrad-0.18 octave-3.2.0 pycdio-0.15 source-highlight-3.0.1 xnee-3.03
To get announcements of most new GNU packages, subscribe to the info-gnu mailing list: http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu. Nearly all GNU software is available from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/, or preferably one of its mirrors (http://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html).
I'd like to give a warm welcome to Arun Persaud, newly-dubbed co-maintainer of xboard. Also, thanks to Simon Josefsson, already maintainer of many GNU packages, for the new GNU package libtasn1.
Several GNU packages are looking for maintainers and other assistance. Please see http://www.gnu.org/server/takeaction.html#unmaint if you'd like to help. The general page on how to help GNU is at http://www.gnu.org/help/help.html. To submit new packages to GNU, see http://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html.
As always, please feel free to write to me, karl@gnu.org, with any GNUish questions or suggestions for future installments.
Richard Stallman's speaking schedule and other FSF events
June 25 | Fundacion Software Libre América Latina -- Porto Alegre, Brazil
June 25 | Copyright vs. Community -- Porto Alegre, Brazil
June 27 | The Danger of Software Patents -- Porto Alegre, Brazil
July 7 | Free Software and the GNU/Linux Desktop -- Las Palmas, Gran Canaria
Take action with the FSF
Contributions from thousands of individual members enable the FSF's work. You can contribute by joining at http://www.fsf.org/join. If you're already a member, you can help refer new members (and earn some rewards) by adding a line with your member number to your email signature like:
I'm an FSF member -- Help us support software freedom! http://www.fsf.org/jf?referrer=2442
The FSF is also always looking for volunteers (http://www.fsf.org/volunteer). From rabble-rousing to hacking, from issue coordination to envelope stuffing -- there's something here for everybody to do. Also, head over to our campaign section (http://www.fsf.org/campaigns) and take action on software patents, DRM, free software adoption, OpenDocument, RIAA and more.
#
Copyright © 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.