July
Issue 28, July 2010
Welcome to the Free Software Supporter, the Free Software Foundation's monthly news digest and action update -- being read by you and 31,956 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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Women's Caucus internship opportunity
- LibrePlanet 2010: Eben Moglen on the current state of free software
- Australian petition needs signatures against software patents
- Recommendations to increase women participation in free software
- Defending against laws which threaten user freedom
- GNU social alpha release
- Reject UltraViolet DRM
- GNU spotlight with Karl Berry
- Richard Stallman's speaking schedule and other FSF events
- Take action with the FSF!
Women's Caucus internship opportunity
The Women's Caucus is seeking an intern to assist with its work to increase the number of women involved in free software. This is a 12-week position for the fall, with some flexibility on the start and end times.
LibrePlanet 2010: Eben Moglen on the current state of free software
At this year's LibrePlanet conference hosted by the Free Software Foundation, Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center gave a keynote speech on the current state of free software and the free software movement. The video of this speech is now online.
In his speech, Eben praises the successes of the free software community and draws attention to some of the challenges that we currently face and will face in the near future.
Australian petition needs signatures against software patents
The Australian Software Freedom Labs has published a petition against software patents for Australians to sign. For non- Australian people, please encourage your Australian contacts to sign it.
Recommendations to increase women's participation in free software
The Women's Caucus has published practical recommendations to increase women's participation in the free software community. These recommendations include adopting strategies for overcoming women's participation obstacles, adopting strategies for projects to invite women and using a mailing list to notify women about speaking opportunities in free software events.
The Women's Caucus is working to develop practical policies and suggestions for the FSF and the free software community at large.
Defending against laws which threaten user freedom
The FSF has published some ways you can help defend against laws that impose tough restrictions on computer users, such as ACTA in the United States and the Digital Economy Act in the United Kingdom.
These laws are meant to spread Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) and punish people who share by disconnecting them from the Internet.
GNU social updates
GNU social has made great progress during the last few weeks -- version alpha 0.1 ("Ritter") was announced and made it finally possible to try out GNU social, and run your own site.
To celebrate the release of GNU social's alpha, buttons are now available to help raise funds for the project.
- http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/gnu-social-alpha-release-ritter-now-available
- http://foocorp.net/gnu-social-buttons.html
Reject UltraViolet DRM
Copyright industry companies are making a big step towards enforcing DRM over users. UltraViolet is a new, large DRM scheme that will keep files on "the cloud", far away from users' control.
The Defective By Design campaign has prepared buttons to be used on websites and blogs to warn other users, in addition to a "take an action" tip.
GNU Spotlight with Karl Berry
The recent GNU software releases:
autoconf-2.66 icecat-3.6.7 rush-1.7 autogen-5.11 idutils-4.5 scm-5e7 clisp-2.49 jacal-1c2 sipwitch-0.8.4 denemo-0.8.18 kawa-1.10 slib-3b3 dico-2.1 libextractor-0.6.2 smalltalk-3.2.1 freeipmi-0.8.8 libmicrohttpd-0.9.0 solfege-3.16.4 gama-1.10 make-3.82 source-highlight-3.1.4 global-5.9.1 mcron-1.0.6 ucommon-3.2.1 gnunet-0.9.0pre1 motti-3.0.0 wb-2b1 gnupg-2.0,16 mpfr-3.0.0 xorriso-0.6.0 gnutls-2.10.1 ocrad-0.20 zile-2.3.18 gv-3.7.1 parallel-20100722 autoconf-archive-2010.07.06
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). You can use the url http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.
This month we welcome Joel Jose as the new maintainer of GNU gnatsweb, and Sebastien Diaz as the new maintainer of GNU rpge (adding to his other packages).
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
2010-08-04 | The Danger of Software Patents Beijing, China
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 © 2010 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.