Free Software Newsletter.

Free Software Supporter

Issue 40, July 2011

Welcome to the Free Software Supporter, the Free Software Foundation’s monthly news digest and action update — being read by you and 44,489 other activists. That’s 1,287 more than last month!

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

  • FSF seeks full-time senior GNU/Linux systems administrator
  • Warn people about YouTube Rentals
  • Help subtitle FSF videos!
  • Thank ‘This American Life’ and ask them to set an example
  • Two new hoodies available in the FSF store
  • Richard Stallman writes: Resist the Temptations of the Cloud!
  • Welcoming our summer interns
  • The Free Game Lag
  • Interview with MusicBrainz developer Kuno Woudt
  • LibrePlanet featured resource: Sonar
  • GNU spotlight with Karl Berry
  • Richard Stallman’s speaking schedule and other FSF events
  • Take action with the FSF!

FSF seeks full-time senior GNU/Linux systems administrator

« The ideal candidate will be a well-rounded GNU/Linux systems administrator who enjoys learning and problem-solving. (S)he will be familiar with the free software community and how it works, and will be more interested in making a substantial contribution to software freedom and having employment consistent with ethical ideals than obtaining the highest salary. »

Interested in applying or know someone else who you think should?

Warn people about YouTube Rentals

YouTube has been recently trying to push their rental service which brings full-length independent movies to YouTube. The new service comes with Digital Restrictions Management that severely limits how videos can be used, prohibiting uses that even US copyright law allows.

We are calling on everyone to join us in refusing to buy YouTube Rentals.

Help subtitle FSF videos!

Richard Stallman’s speeches and the Free Software Foundation’s other videos have brought free software philosophy to many computer users. Stallman has given speeches in Spanish and French in addition to English, but even more could be done to bring these videos to speakers of other languages — and to the hearing-impaired community.

We are happy to announce the new community effort to subtitle videos and to translate them on Universal Subtitles. Please volunteer some time to help make the philosophy and history behind the free software movement accessible to whole new communities!

  • http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/teams/free-software-foundation/

Thank ‘This American Life’ and ask them to set an example

The publicly funded radio show ‘This American Life’ recently ran an hour-long story « When Patents Attack! », which highlighted how patent litigation and threats hamper software development. Their work in creating public awareness of this topic is laudable, but we are asking them to go one step further and to begin distributing their radio show in Ogg Vorbis format so that people are not required to follow MP3 patent terms in order to listen.

Two new hoodies available in the FSF store

We are excited to announce that we have a new and improved version of our black GPLv3 hoodie, as well as a brand new one in maroon sporting the popular « Free Software, Free Society » logo!

Richard Stallman writes: Resist the Temptations of the Cloud!

« The World Wide Web, developed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990 as a system for publishing and viewing information, is slowly being transformed into a system of remote computing. It will store your data, and data about you, often limiting your access to it but allowing the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) access at any time. It will do your computing for you, but you cannot control what it does. It provides various tempting attractions, but you must resist them. »

Read the full article on Spiegel Online:

Welcoming our summer interns

This summer, the FSF welcomed four eager interns, whom we are excited to be working with: Bob Call and Jonathan Nadeau are working alongside our campaigns managers; Martin Dluhos is working will with our system administration team; and, William Theaker is working with Brett Smith in the Licensing and Compliance Lab.

Each one of them wrote an introduction highlighting their backgrounds and plans for this summer.

The Free Game Lag

We published an essay, which Danny Piccirillo wrote for our Fall 2010 Bulletin, that highlights the difficulties facing free software games:

The business models for production simply need to change, and just like they have for other software, they will for gaming as well. When people ask you how gaming as we know it can exist in a free software world, you should open your response with, « It can’t, but it can be better. »

Interview with MusicBrainz developer Kuno Woudt

We published an interview that our campaigns manager, Matt Lee, did with Kuno Woudt of MusicBrainz at FSCONS 2010. The interview was also originally published in the Fall 2010 issue of the FSF Bulletin.

LibrePlanet featured resource: Sonar

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 LibrePlanet group, Sonar, which is building information and documentation around free and completely accessible GNU/Linux distributions.

Do you have a suggestion for next month’s featured resource? Let us know at campaigns@fsf.org.

GNU Spotlight with Karl Berry

New GNU releases:
aspell-0.60.6.1 global-5.9.7 sipwitch-1.1.0 autoconf-archive-2011.07.17 guile-2.0.2 solfege-3.20.1 bzr-2.3.4 libmicrohttpd-0.9.13 spell-1.1 ccrtp-2.0.1 myserver-0.11 ucommon-5.0.5 gcal-3.6.1 nettle-2.2 xorriso-1.1.2 gdb-7.3 parallel-20110722

To get announcements of most new GNU releases, 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 Bill Pedersen as the new maintainer of GNU vmslib http://www.gnu.org/software/vmslib. Thanks Bill.

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

2011-08-05 Software Libre en la Ética y en la Práctica
Carupano, Venezuela

2011-08-24 Free Software for Your Freedom
Nottingham, United Kingdom

2011-08-26 Copyrights vs. Community
Edinburgh, Scotland

2011-08-28 A Free Digital Society
Edinburgh, Scotland

http://www.fsf.org/events/20110827-fds-edinburgh

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 © 2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

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