November
Issue 32, November 2010
Welcome to the Free Software Supporter, the Free Software Foundation's monthly news digest and action update -- being read by you and 35,457 other activists. That's 1,826 more than last month!
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Savannah and www.gnu.org downtime
- Gaming on GNU/Linux: Ryzom MMORPG goes native
- GNU contributor statistics for November 2010
- The Internet blacklist (COICA) is back
- Canadian appeal court says 1-click patentable
- GNU spotlight with Karl Berry
- Richard Stallman's speaking schedule and other FSF events
- Take action with the FSF!
Savannah and www.gnu.org downtime
Over the weekend of the 26th, Savannah was compromised, which led to vandalism on www.gnu.org. We've restored www.gnu.org, but Savannah restoration is still in progress. Here's a chronological account of the events:
Gaming on GNU/Linux: Ryzom MMORPG goes native
In May of this year we celebrated the freeing of the massively-multiplayer online science-fantasy role-playing game, Ryzom, under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License (GNU AGPLv3). Since then, the developer community around Ryzom has been busy, and today they have announced their release of the official native GNU/Linux client, and a fun competition to find seven relevant GNU/Linux artifacts hidden throughout the game.
GNU contributor statistics for November 2010
As part of an article for the forthcoming FSF Bulletin, we are publishing the latest numbers for GNU contributors, broken down by country.
If you are not already an associate member of the Free Software Foundation, please consider supporting our mission to protect computer users' freedom and get (among other things) a copy of our biannual Bulletin!
The Internet blacklist (COICA) is back
The bill to censor the Internet was passed out of committee but you can still sign Demand Progress's petition asking Congress to stop it.
Canadian appeal court says 1-click patentable
The Canadian Federal Court has ruled that Amazon's infamous, absurd 1-click patent was valid. You can review the interesting analysis of the court decision, prepared by our End Software Patents campaign volunteers.
- http://news.swpat.org/2010/11/canada-1-click-patentable/
- http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Amazon_v._Commissioner_for_Patents_%282010,_Canada%29
LibrePlanet featured resource: Women's Caucus
Every month on LibrePlanet, we highlight one resource that is interesting and useful -- often one that could use your help.
For this month, we are highlighting the Women's Caucus resources, which provide information about the barriers to women's participation in the free software movement, and provide practical steps to solve them. You are invited to adopt, spread and improve this important resource.
Do you have a suggestion for next month's featured resource? Let us know at campaigns@fsf.org.
GNU Spotlight with Karl Berry
acct-6.5.5 gnutls-2.10.3 recutils-1.0 autogen-5.11.3 icecat-3.6.12 sipwitch-0.9.2 commoncpp2-1.8.1 kawa-1.11 solfege-3.18.7 coreutils-8.7 libmicrohttpd-0.9.3 tar-1.25 CSSC-1.3.0 libsigsegv-2.9 tramp-2.2.0 dfarc-3.8.1 miscfiles-1.5 vc-dwim-1.3 freedink-1.08.20101114 nano-2.2.6 wdiff-0.6.4 freeipmi-0.8.11 parallel-20101122 zile-2.3.21
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 Tom Rondeau as the new maintainer of GNU Radio, and several new co-maintainers: Todd Moses for dap, Eric Blake for gnulib, Giuseppe Scrivano for barcode, and Karsten and Sebastian Hilbert for GNUmed.
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
2010-12-06 | Le mouvement du logiciel libre et le système opérationnel GNU/Linux Quebec, Canada * http://www.fsf.org/events/20101206-fs-quebec
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.
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The Free Software Supporter is edited by FSF volunteer Osama Khalid.
Copyright © 2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
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