Free Software Supporter
Issue 44, November 2011
Welcome to the Free Software Supporter, the Free Software Foundation’s monthly news digest and action update — being read by you and 51,926 other activists. That’s 1,559 more than last month!
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
- Stop the Internet Blacklist Legislation
- Amazon’s Kindle source code: Much ado about nothing
- Announcing Debugging with GDB, Tenth Edition for Version 7.3.1
- Holiday Shopping Guide
- Richard Stallman on Russia Today
- Photos from Richard Stallman’s talk in San Juan del Rio
- This holiday season donate support to free software!
- Will sprint for freedom: Report from the NYC CiviCRM code sprint
- Web search by the people, for the people
- LibrePlanet featured resource
- GNU spotlight with Karl Berry
- Upcoming Richard Stallman speeches
- Take action with the FSF
Stop the Internet Blacklist Legislation
Join us, Fight for the Future, EFF, Demand Progress, and most of the Internet in opposing the latest round of Internet Blacklist legislation. If you live in the US, it’s vital that you contact your Senators today and ask them to oppose the legislation.
- http://fsf.org/blogs/community/stop-the-internet-blacklist-legislation
- http://americancensorship.org/index2.html
Amazon’s Kindle source code: Much ado about nothing
This week there’s been a lot of fuss about Amazon releasing source code for software on its Kindle devices, including the Kindle Fire. A lot of the hype we’ve seen is simply unwarranted; while you can download the source code that Amazon was legally required to publish, most of the software on the device remains proprietary, and every Kindle is still Defective by Design.
Announcing Debugging with GDB, Tenth Edition for Version 7.3.1
The GNU Press is happy to announce that the latest version of our popular GDB manual is now available at shop.fsf.org. The book features over 500 pages of documentation, updated to correspond with version 7.3.1 of the GNU Debugger.
Holiday Shopping Guide
Thinking of doing some holiday shopping? We hope that when purchasing for loved ones and friends that you’ll consider avoiding companies and products designed to restrict freedom and consider supporting companies and organizations that defend freedom.
Richard Stallman on Russia Today
The free software movement’s indefatigable founder Richard Stallman is known the world over as a software freedom activist and programming whiz. On Thursday, December 1, he will appear on RT’s Spotlight program.
- http://rt.com/art-and-culture/news/richard-stallman-software-freedom-579/
Photos from Richard Stallman’s talk in San Juan del Rio
Back in May 2011, Richard was in San Juan del Rio, Mexico, where several hundred people were in attendance to hear him speak, to give his speech « El movimiento del software libre. »
Free software supporter José Oscar Alvarez Cervantes was there and took some great photographs which really captured the mood at the event.
This holiday season donate support to free software!
Opt out of the season’s usual consumerism, and give a gift membership to your loved ones. Are you dreading the end of this month and all it entails in terms of mall-parking expeditions and frenzied spending amidst crowds of other buyers?
Membership donations are the most critical part of the FSF’s funding, and an FSF membership will go to support our campaigns to defend and promote computer users’ freedom. Your gift recipient will receive a number of benefits: an ultra-slim USB membership card, the opportunity to take advantage of the FSF-member e-mail forwarding service, free attendance at the annual LibrePlanet conference, a 20 percent discount on FSF merchandise, the FSF’s biannual bulletin, and discounts on training classes.
Will sprint for freedom: Report from the NYC CiviCRM code sprint
Late last month, FSF executive director John Sullivan attended a two-day code sprint in New York for CiviCRM, the free software constituent relationship management system. He wanted to say a few words about it because he thought it was a great experience, and a good model for other free software projects to follow (many already do!).
Web Search By The People, For The People
The YaCy project is releasing version 1.0 of its peer-to-peer free software search engine. The software takes a radically new approach to search. YaCy does not use a central server. Instead, its search results come from a network of currently over 600 independent peers. In such a distributed network, no single entity decides what gets listed, or in which order results appear.
LibrePlanet featured resource: LibrePlanet 2012 Call for Papers
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 our call for papers for the upcoming LibrePlanet 2012 conference.
Do you have a suggestion for next month’s featured resource? Let us know at campaigns@fsf.org.
GNU Spotlight with Karl Berry
binutils-2.22 gnutls-2.12.14 libtasn1-2.11 bzr-2.4.2 gnutls-3.0.8 mediagoblin-0.1.0 ccrtp-2.0.2 grep-2.10 mit-scheme-9.1.1 emacs-23.3b gss-1.0.2 parallel-20111122 freeipmi-1.0.9 gtypist-2.9 recutils-1.4 gdbm-1.10 gtypist-2.9.1 sipwitch-1.1.3 gnu-c-manual-0.2.2 libcdio-0.83 ucommon-5.0.7 gnuhealth-1.4.2 libextractor-0.6.3 wdiff-1.1.0 gnunet-0.9.0pre4 libidn-1.23 xboard-4.5.3a gnustep/libobjc2-1.6 libmicrohttpd-0.9.17 xorriso-1.1.8
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 Adam Spiers as the new co-maintainer of GNU Stow.
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
- Dec 01, 2011 11:30 AM — Moscow, Russia — Defending your freedom
http://www.fsf.org/events/20111201-fs-moscow-2
- Dec 02, 2011 04:00 PM — Moscow, Russia — Copyright vs. Community
http://www.fsf.org/events/20111202-cvc-moscow
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 © 2011 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.
—
Follow us on identi.ca at http://identi.ca/fsf | Subscribe to our blogs via RSS at http://fsf.org/blogs/RSS
Join us as an associate member at http://fsf.org/jf
Sent from the Free Software Foundation,
Fifth Floor
Boston, MA 02110-1335
United States