[FSF] Free Software Supporter -- Issue 25, April 2010

[Matt Lee]

Welcome to the Free Software Supporter, the Free Software Foundation's
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

* Day Against DRM: Tuesday, May 4th, 2010
* GNU Hackers' Meetings, July 24th-25th, 2010
* Stop BBC Digital Restrictions Management
* LibrePlanet was a great success!
* 2009 Free Software Awards announced
* Time for nonprofits to leave proprietary fundraising software systems
behind
* FSF Compliance Lab helps CiviCRM establish licensing best practices
* GNU Generation 2.0
* Patent Absurdity: A short film on software patents
* Who does that server really serve?
* Defective by Design: Design a new sticker!
* Digital economy bill: One clown giveth and the other clown taketh away
* Using the GPL for Eclipse plug-ins
* Bradley Kuhn joins the FSF Board
* Why I'm rejecting your email attachment
* FSF opposes more copyright enforcement in Joint Strategic Plan
* Finding oodles of Adas
* Trisquel 3.5 Awen released
* GNU spotlight with Karl Berry
* Richard Stallman's speaking schedule and other FSF events
* Take action with the FSF!

## Day Against DRM: Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

As part of its Defective by Design anti-DRM campaign, the Free
Software Foundation will be helping to coordinate anti-DRM activists
all over the world on May 4th, 2010, to mobilize the public against DRM.
Organizations and individuals that want to be involved can contact
<address@hidden> or visit <http://defectivebydesign.org/> to
sign up and follow the campaign.

* <http://www.fsf.org/news/may-4-day-against-drm>

## GNU Hackers' Meetings, July 24th-25th, 2010

GNU Hackers' Meetings are informal meetings for GNU maintainers and
active contributors. A GNU Hackers' Meeting will be held on July
24th-25th, 2010, during the GUADEC 2010 conference in The Hague,
Netherlands. The free secure networking and decentralized applications
issues will be discussed. This is a technical meeting, all GNU
contributors are welcome.

* <http://www.gnu.org/ghm/>

## Stop BBC Digital Restrictions Management

The Open Rights Group (ORG) is having a campaign to raise the
awareness about the new danger of including DRM in BBC's high
definition TV shows. The restrictions will prevent people from
recording some TV shows and will auto-remove other records after a
given time. Please join this campaign and defend your right to watch,
share and document TV materials.

* <http://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/stop-bbc-drm>

## LibrePlanet was a great success!

FSF hosted its annual conference, LibrePlanet, in Cambridge,
Massachusetts on March 19th-21st. During the conference, the free
software community awards were given and a GNU Hackers Meeting was
held, in addition to a track discussing ways to increase women's
participation in the free software movement, and keynotes by John
Gilmore, Richard Stallman, and Eben Moglen. We are looking forward to
a successful 2011 free software activism conference! And stay tuned
for audio and video recordings from the 2010 sessions.

* <http://libreplanet.org/2010/>

## 2009 Free Software Awards announced

During LibrePlanet 2010, this year's Free Software Awards were
announced. The award for the Advancement of Free Software was won by
John Gilmore and the award for Project of Social Benefit was won by
the Internet Archive. The awards were presented by FSF president
Richard Stallman.

Gilmore was given the award for the Advancement of Free Software for
his great, early role in giving free software a place in the business
world by founding Cygnus Solutions, and for his long-term free
software contributions and donations.

The Internet Archive was given the Social Benefit award for building a
massive free Internet library, for providing millions of books, audio
and video recordings, and for building and contributing to several
free software projects.

* <http://www.fsf.org/news/2009-free-software-awards>

## Time for nonprofits to leave proprietary fundraising software systems
behind

The FSF announced that CiviCRM has earned its recommendation as a
fully featured donor and contact management system for nonprofits.

The FSF had highlighted the need for a free software solution in
this area as part of its High Priority Projects campaign. With
this announcement, the FSF will also be adopting CiviCRM for
its own use, and actively encouraging other nonprofit
organizations to do the same.

* <http://www.fsf.org/news/nonprofit-fundraising-civicrm>

## FSF Compliance Lab helps CiviCRM establish licensing best practices

Today the FSF announced that one of our high-priority projects has
been fulfilled: CiviCRM provides an excellent donor and contact
management system for nonprofit organizations. As part of the
preparation for this announcement, the Compliance Lab helped the
project handle its licensing issues more consistently.

*
<http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/fsf-compliance-lab-helps-civicrm-establish-licensing-best-practices>

## GNU Generation 2.0

A new theme for GNU Generation, FSF's project to encourage young
people to join the free software community, was announced during
LibrePlanet 2010. The new version depends on completed tasks instead
of monthly progress reports. We encourage young people to join the
project to find exciting tasks and people with common interests.

* <http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/gnu-generation-two-point-zero>

## Patent Absurdity: A short film on software patents

Patent Absurdity, a short film directed by Luca Lucarini and supported
by a grant from the FSF, was officially released. Patent Absurdity
makes the case against software patents, featuring interviews with
economists Ben Klemens and James Bessen, and legal scholars Dan
Ravicher, Eben Moglen and Karen Sandler. The film, made entirely with
free software in the Ogg Theora format, is available for anyone to
download and redistribute at no cost from its web site.

* <http://patentabsurdity.com/>
* <http://www.fsf.org/news/new-documentary-film-patent-absurdity>

## Who does that server really serve?

Richard Stallman, FSF president and founder, published a new article
explaining the relationship between proprietary software and software
doing users' computing on remote servers. A printed copy of the
article was handed out during his keynote at LibrePlanet 2010.

> With free software, we, the users, take back control of our
> computing. Proprietary software still exists, but we can exclude it
> from our lives and many of us have done so. However, we now face a
> new threat to our control over our computing: Software as a
> Service.

* <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html>

## Defective by Design: Design a new sticker!

FSF's Defective by Design campaign is having a contest for designing
a new sticker. The existing pink one features the problem of DRM'd
music on iPod, and it was pink to fit Apple's pink iPod advertising
back in 2006. However, now we need to make one that focuses on DRM'd
applications, games and movies on iPod, iPhone and iPad.

The contest will be held until the end of May and the three best
designers will get a LibrePlanet t-shirt! Join and let your designer
friends know!

* <http://www.defectivebydesign.org/new-sticker>

## Digital economy bill: One clown giveth and the other clown taketh away

MPs are pushing for faster broadband in the digital economy bill --
but also planning to restrict what the public can do with it.

When I read about Gordon Brown's plan to give the UK more broadband, I
couldn't restrain my laughter. Isn't this the same clown now busy
circumventing democracy to take away broadband from Britons who
already have it? And what good would broadband do them if they're
punished for using it (or even being suspected of using it)? Laying
cables would be a waste of resources if people are not allowed to use
them.

* <http://ur1.ca/w46v>

## Using the GPL for Eclipse plug-ins

Recently we've seen some questions about whether Eclipse plug-ins can
be released under the GPL. Answered briefly, this is possible if you
can provide an additional permission with the license to allow
combining your plug-in with the necessary EPL-covered libraries. The
rest of this post examines why an additional permission is necessary,
and has specific recommendations for interested developers.

* <http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/using-the-gpl-for-eclipse-plug-ins>

## Bradley Kuhn joins the FSF Board

When I started working at the Free Software Foundation in September
2001, it was to join a team that then-executive director Bradley Kuhn
was putting together. It was a period of transition for the FSF.

* <http://www.fsf.org/blogs/bradley-kuhn-joins-the-fsf-board>

## Why I'm rejecting your email attachment

The FSF launched a campaign calling on all computer users to start
politely rejecting email attachments sent in secret and proprietary
formats: for freedom and the good of the web!

The campaign is in support of Document Freedom Day and the
OpenDocument format. OpenDocument is an ISO standard that allows
anyone to create software that supports it, without fear of patent
claims or licensing issues. Documents, spreadsheets and presentations
sent in Microsoft Word or Excel native formats, or documents created
in Apple's iWorks, are proprietary and incompatible with freedom and
an accessible web.

* <http://www.fsf.org/news/why-im-rejecting-your-email-attachment>

## FSF opposes more copyright enforcement in Joint Strategic Plan

The United States' newly-created "Intellectual Property" Enforcement
Coordinator asked for public comments on a Joint Strategic Plan to
make copyright enforcement more effective. The FSF submitted an
argument that the government should use free software to provide more
freedom and transparency to its constituents and eliminate enforcement
of proprietary software licenses.

*
<http://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-advocates-free-software-for-u.s.-ipec-joint-strategic-plan>
* <http://ur1.ca/rkio>

## Finding oodles of Adas

My thoughts on the Women's Caucus we held on Sunday and a few of the
inspiring women who participated.

* <http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/finding-oodles-of-adas>

## Trisquel 3.5 Awen released

Trisquel GNU/Linux 3.5, codename Awen, is ready. This release is a
fully free Ubuntu 9.10 derivative that includes extra software, better
multimedia support, more translations and a faster configuration. For
this release we used Ext4 for the root filesystem and XFS for the home
one, to have a balance between speed and usability. Some important
features include a much faster boot process and the ability to encrypt
the home directory.

* <http://trisquel.info/en/trisquel-35-awen-release-announcement>

## GNU Spotlight with Karl Berry

The recent GNU software releases:

bison-2.4.2             gnunet-0.9.0pre0        mit-scheme-9.0.1
cpio-2.11               gnupg-2.0.15            nano-2.2.4
cppi-1.15               gnutls-2.8.6            rottlog-0.72.2
ddrescue-1.12           grep-2.6.3              sipwitch-0.8.0
denemo-0.8.16           gsasl-1.4.4             solfege-3.16.1
dionysus-1.2.0          gsl-1.14                swbis-1.5
freedink-1.08.20100321  gss-1.0.0               tar-1.23
gcal-3.5.1              hello-2.6               tramp-2.1.18
gcc-4.5.0               icecat-3.6.3            ucommon-2.1.1
gdb-7.1                 inetlib-1.1.2           wdiff-0.6.1
gecb-0.8.3              libextractor-0.6.1      xboard-4.4.3
gidfwizard-0.6.3        libgsasl-1.4.4          xorriso-0.5.2
global-5.8.2            libmicrohttpd-0.4.6
gnuedma-0.18.1          libtasn1-2.5

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 Matt Lee as the maintainer of the new
(and ongoing) packages goodbye, GNU FM, network, and social.
We also welcome Jason Self as the new maintainer of gnutrition.

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, <address@hidden>, with any
GNUish questions or suggestions for future installments.

## Richard Stallman's speaking schedule and other FSF events

2010-04-24 | Keynote speech
 Ewing, NY

* <http://www.fsf.org/events/20100424trenton>

2010-05-01 | The Free Software Movement
 San Francisco, CA - 1675 Owens Street, Mission Bay Conference Center
at UCSF

* <http://www.fsf.org/events/20100501sanfrancisco>

2010-05-11 | Free Software in Ethics and in Practice
 Frascati, Rome

* <http://www.fsf.org/events/20100511frascati>

### 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.

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