Welcome to the Free Software Supporter, the Free Software
Foundation's (FSF) monthly news digest and action update -- being read
by you and 231,664 other activists.
When we work together, we achieve our goals
From July 31
July 28, 2023 marked the end of our most recent associate member
drive. We appreciate the community that helped us extend our reach,
are proud of every single associate member who is supporting our work,
and are immensely thankful for all the donations we received. This
membership drive started slow, so we called for your help, and you
answered our call: we saw a surge of forty-five new associate members
in the week of the extension -- for a total of 111 new members joining
since the launch of the member drive. This shows once more: when we
work together we can achieve our goals. A big thank you to all those
who shared our appeal, put our banner on their websites, and/or gifted
memberships to their friends or family members. Every new member is
one person more who proudly carries the free software message into the
world.
Want to read this newsletter translated into another language? Scroll
to the end to read the Supporter in French or Spanish.
"Web Environment Integrity" is an all-out attack on the free Internet
From July 28
Using a free browser is now more important than ever. The so-called
"Web Environment Integrity" (WEI) API, which is poised to restrict
users via their browsers, is the worst stunt we've seen from Google in
some time. Beginning its life as an innocuous, if worrying, policy
document posted to Microsoft GitHub, Google has now fast-tracked its
development into their Chromium browser. At its current rate of
progress, WEI -- which basically amounts to Digital Restrictions
Management (DRM) in the browser -- will be upon us in no time. Read
why WEI is terrible, and why we must vocally oppose it now. Google's
latest maneuver, if we don't act to stop it, threatens our freedom to
explore the Internet with browsers of our choice.
From pro-democracy activists to minorities: Why people use Tor and encrypted chats
From July 27
Read the stories of people who are protecting their privacy with free
software, why they choose freedom and privacy, and why we must
continue to fight to protect our freedoms. Learn about a political
activist who was harassed by her government for speaking up; how
people in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China use the Tor network to access
censored websites like Wikipedia; and how members of the queer
community in Egypt, for example, are increasingly resorting to
encrypted chats in order to keep their communication hidden from the
prying eyes of the police.
The campaigns team and the community work together for free software
From July 25
This month, we published three new Working Together for Free
Software profiles. While their voices may be those of just a small
fraction of the community, we hope their outstanding dedication to the
free software movement will inspire you. We hope that you'll share
them with others, too, under the #WorkingTogether hashtag. Our first
profile follows two developers, Adrien and Sébastien, from the Free
Software Award-winning GNU Jami project, a free as in freedom solution
for private videoconferencing. Next, we hear from fellow Free Software
Award winner Protesilaos Stavrou on what motivates his work on GNU
Emacs. We round out the updates to the Working Together profiles
with an interview of Ali Miracle, a developer with the Uruk
project. Each of these three new profiles comes with an accompanying
article with complete responses to interview questions posed by our
campaigns team.
The second round of FSF board candidate discussions started July 24
The FSF board has chosen a second round of candidates as part of its
board process. All eligible associate members can participate in this
discussion to get involved in the FSF's ongoing search for new board
members. The second round candidates are Luis Guzmán, Maria Chiara
Pievatolo, Markus Schmidt, and Jason Self. As documented in the board
process, FSF associate members are invited to discussions considering
these candidates in the nominee discussion forum. This discussion
round opened on July 24 and is planned to close six weeks
later. Participants must pledge to abide by the participation
agreement.
Spring Bulletin: From privacy-respecting browser extensions to natural disaster relief
From July 13
The 2023 spring Free Software Foundation Bulletin is now online!
Read about free software's role in the right to repair movement,
privacy-oriented browser plugin JShelter, a freedom-enabled volunteer
rescue response to an earthquake, an overview of licensing talks from
this year's LibrePlanet, and a report from the FSF's tech team on how
this year's hybrid LibrePlanet was broadcast live with free software.
This article gives a glimpse behind the scenes of recent work done by
the FSF tech team. Read about Prometheus network security, completion
of member data migration from an old system to a new system, system
software upgrades, and other work done by the team to keep critical
infrastructure running reliably every day.
Our copyright & licensing associate Craig Topham is continuously
working together with free software developers, lawyers, and
volunteers to assist the community with their licensing questions,
finding hardware that respects your freedom, and keeping the public
informed of interesting free software projects. In this article, Craig
shares some of the accomplishments the Licensing and Compliance Lab
achieved during the last six months.
RISC-V, a processor architecture under a free license, is improving at
an increasingly rapid pace since its debut nearly a decade ago. The
attention it is receiving by developers globally is encouraging to
those of us who use free software and care about their privacy since
it promises to empower us with a replacement for proprietary processor
architectures such Intel and AMD, which give remote access to their
manufacturers by design. This article also
reports on the recent gains made to supporting free software generally
on RISC-V processing architecture.
Software freedom & trademarks: Examining Rust's new policy through the lens of free software history
From July 27 by Denver Gingerich
This article, recently published by the Software Freedom Conservancy,
examines the programming language Rust's new trademark policy through
the lens of history. Other similar trademark policies in the past such
as Java's, PHP's, and Mozilla's have had consequences for the free
software community. Inform yourself about this relevant and important
topic by examining these case studies, and use this knowledge to
prepare yourself for the inevitable discussions ahead.
In these issues: What is GNU Emacs for beginners, displaying an
analog clock and playing Tetris in GNU Emacs, editing Scalar Vector
Graphic (SVG) files, many new MELPA packages, and more!
Join the FSF and friends in updating the Free Software Directory
Tens of thousands of people visit directory.fsf.org each month to
discover free software. Each entry in the Directory contains a wealth
of useful information, from basic category and descriptions to version
control, IRC channels, documentation, and licensing. The Free Software
Directory has been a great resource to software users over the past
decade, but it needs your help staying up-to-date with new and
exciting free software projects.
To help, join our weekly IRC meetings on Fridays. Meetings take place
in the #fsf channel on Libera.Chat, and usually include a handful of
regulars as well as newcomers. Libera.Chat is accessible from any IRC
client -- Everyone's welcome!
The next meeting is Friday, August 4 from 12:00 to 15:00 EDT (16:00 to
19:00 UTC). Details here:
LibrePlanet featured resource: LibrePlanet Pages that Need Work
Every month on the LibrePlanet
wiki, we highlight one
resource that is interesting and useful -- often one that could use
your help.
For this month, we are highlighting the LibrePlanet Pages that Need
Work page, which in itself needs some work! You are invited to add to
this page, which is a list of pages from the LibrePlanet wiki that
need work.
Also, please join our second ever LibrePlanet Wiki Edit Fest,
happening Wednesday, August 23 from 12:30 to 14:00 EDT (16:30 to
18:00 UTC). Details here:
To download: nearly all GNU software is available most reliably from
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/. Optionally, you may find faster download
speeds at a mirror located geographically closer to you by choosing
from the list of mirrors published at
https://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html, or you may use
https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a
(hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.
This month, we welcome Adrien Bourmault and Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli
as co-maintainers of the new package GNU Boot, a free boot firmware
distribution for initializing your hardware and booting your operating
system.
We appreciate everyone who donates to the Free Software Foundation,
and we'd like to give special recognition to the folks who have
donated $500 or more in the last month.
Assigning your copyright to the Free Software Foundation helps us
defend the GNU GPL and keep software free. The following individuals
have assigned their copyright to the FSF (and allowed public
appreciation) in the past month:
Jeffrey Bencteux (GNU Inetutils)
John Muhl (GNU Emacs)
Matheus Branco Borella (GDB)
Sergey Alexandrovich Bugaev (GCC, GDB, GNU C Library, GNU Hurd, GNU Mach, GNUstep)
Wang Diancheng (GNU Emacs)
Want to see your name on this list? Contribute to GNU and assign your
copyright to the FSF.
Contributions from thousands of individual associate members enable
the FSF's work. You can contribute by joining at
https://my.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:
Do you read and write Portuguese and English? The FSF is looking
for translators for the Free Software Supporter. Please send an
email to [email protected] with your interest and a list of your
experience and qualifications.
