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Read and share online: https://www.fsf.org/free-software-supporter/2021/may
Welcome to the Free Software Supporter, the Free Software
Foundation's (FSF) monthly news digest and action update -- being read
by you and 225,095 other activists. That's 528 more than last month!
Work is continuing to improve governance at the FSF
From April 29th
Since the announcement that FSF founder Richard Matthew Stallman (RMS)
was returning to the FSF board of directors at the end of the
LibrePlanet conference in March, the board has been working hard on
efforts to make the FSF more transparent and responsive to the needs
of the free software community. The changes in the operations and
leadership of the FSF are still ongoing as of this writing, and new
announcements will continue to be released over the coming weeks;
please watch https://www.fsf.org/news and FSF social media
accounts for continued updates. Changes to
the FSF's bylaws and structure need to be done with great care, but
the board is moving with urgency. We do read all of the feedback sent
to us at [email protected].
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Free Software Wireless-N Mini Router v3 from ThinkPenguin, Inc. now FSF-certified to Respect Your Freedom
- "FLOSS for Science" podcast interviews FSF copyright and licensing associate about GNU licenses
- How I fought to graduate without using nonfree software
- Identifying "underproduced" software
- Apple will reportedly face EU antitrust charges this week
- Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, part III
- Software-hardware forced bundling: When exercising your rights is an individual feat, the rules must change
- Dortmund relies on free software: This paves the way for "Public Money? Public Code!"
- Twenty years of FSFE: Interview with Fernanda Weiden
- GUADEC 2021: Registrations are now open!
- States are moving on privacy bills. Over 4 in 5 voters want the US Congress to prioritize protection of online data.
- University responds to ban on Linux kernel contributions
- Q&A with Grafana Labs CEO Raj Dutt about our licensing changes
- Signal CEO cracks Cellebrite iPhone decryption device used by cops
- GCC 11.1 released
- April GNU Emacs news
- Join the FSF and friends in updating the Free Software Directory
- LibrePlanet featured resource: Defective by Design/Ideas/Guide
- GNU Spotlight with Mike Gerwitz: 16 new GNU releases!
- FSF and other free software events
- Thank GNUs!
- GNU copyright contributions
- Translations of the Free Software Supporter
- Take action with the FSF!
View this issue online here:
https://www.fsf.org/free-software-supporter/2021/may
Encourage your friends to subscribe and help us build an audience by
adding our subscriber widget to your Web site.
Miss an issue? You can catch up on back issues at
https://www.fsf.org/free-software-supporter.
Want to read this newsletter translated into another language? Scroll
to the end to read the Supporter in French, Spanish, or Portuguese.
Free Software Wireless-N Mini Router v3 from ThinkPenguin, Inc. now FSF-certified to Respect Your Freedom
From April 30th
The FSF has awarded Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification to the
Free Software Wireless-N Mini Router v3 (TPE-R1300) from ThinkPenguin,
Inc. The RYF certification mark means that these products meet the
FSF's standards in regard to users' freedom, control over the product,
and privacy. This is ThinkPenguin's first device to receive RYF
certification in 2021, adding to their vast catalogue of certified
devices.
"FLOSS for Science" podcast interviews FSF copyright and licensing associate about GNU licenses
From April 30th by FLOSS for Science
In August 2020, the FSF's copyright and licensing associate Craig
Topham was invited to a conversation with David Brassard and Patrick
Diehl about GNU licenses, on their podcast, which has the goal of
showcasing free software uses in science. The episode release was
delayed by the pandemic, but the interview is finally now available --
check it out!
How I fought to graduate without using nonfree software
From April 17th by Wojciech Kosior
During the pandemic, we saw educational facilities hastily embrace
proprietary tools such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and WhatsApp. Schools
and universities then tried to impose them on students, who
subsequently suffered the loss of freedom from using programs that
users don't control, as well as bad security and violations of
privacy.
Because I refuse to use unethical software, the complete reliance on
proprietary platforms has created an ethical conflict. My aim has been
to complete my university degree without surrendering to the imposed
nonfree services, by convincing my professors to allow me to use only
free software replacements to proprietary applications. I didn't
expect to win a fight against such power, but now, through polite but
firm action, I think I may have prevailed. Hopefully this story will
help you resist, too.
Identifying "underproduced" software
From March 29th by Benjamin Mako Hill and Kaylea Champion
Critical software we all rely on can silently crumble away beneath
us. Unfortunately, we often don’t find out software infrastructure is
in poor condition until it is too late. Over the last year or so, I
have been supporting Kaylea Champion on a project my group announced
earlier to measure software underproduction -- a term we use to
describe software that is low in quality but high in importance.
Underproduction reflects an important type of risk in widely used free
software because participants often choose their own projects and
tasks. Because free software contributors work as volunteers and
choose what they work on, important projects aren’t always the ones to
which free software developers devote the most attention. Even when
developers want to work on important projects, relative neglect among
important projects is often difficult for free software contributors
to see.
Apple will reportedly face EU antitrust charges this week
From April 27th by Tom Warren
The European Commission will issue antitrust charges against Apple
over concerns about the company’s App Store practices, according to a
report from the Financial Times. The commission has been
investigating whether Apple has broken EU competition rules with its
App Store policies, following an initial complaint from Spotify back
in 2019 over Apple’s 30 percent cut on subscriptions.
The European Commission opened up two antitrust investigations into
Apple’s App Store and Apple Pay practices last year, and the
Financial Times only mentions upcoming charges on the App Store
case. It’s not clear yet what action will be taken.
Obviously, our issues with Apple and the App Store go quite a bit
deeper than antitrust issues -- you can read more about our issues
with Apple here and about the
shortcomings of merely focusing on antitrust
here.
Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, part III
From April 18th by Alyssa Rosenzweig
After a few weeks of investigating the Apple M1 GPU in January, I was
able to draw a triangle with my own free code. Although I began
dissecting the instruction set, the shaders there were specified as
machine code. A real graphics driver needs a compiler from high-level
shading languages (GLSL or Metal) to a native binary. Our
understanding of the M1 GPU’s instruction set has advanced over the
past few months. Last week, I began writing a free software shader
compiler targeting the Apple GPU. Progress has been rapid: at the end
of its first week, it can compile both basic vertex and fragment
shaders, sufficient to render 3D scenes. The spinning cube pictured
above has its shaders written in idiomatic GLSL, compiled with the
nascent free software compiler, and rendered with native code like the
first triangle in January. No proprietary blobs here!
Software-hardware forced bundling: When exercising your rights is an individual feat, the rules must change
From April 11th by April
The Court of Monza, Italy, confirmed in December 2020 that one is
entitled to a refund for a Microsoft Windows license that was
purchased along with a computer, and ordered Lenovo to pay €20,000 in
damages to Luca Bonissi, the plaintiff, for abusive behavior. This
impressive win, obtained by a free software activist after a
courageous legal struggle, is a clear reminder of the need to fight
the forced bundling of software and hardware, and to change the rules
of the game.
Dortmund relies on free software: This paves the way for "Public Money? Public Code!"
From March 31st by Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE)
With a groundbreaking resolution, the city of Dortmund, Germany has
committed itself to the use of free software. With an overwhelming,
cross-faction majority, the city council has paved the way for "Public
Money? Public Code!” In the future, software developed or commissioned
by the administration will be made available to the general public.
Twenty years of FSFE: Interview with Fernanda Weiden
From April 20th by FSFE
As part of their birthday celebration, FSFE interviewed Fernanda
Weiden, the co-founder of the FSF Latin America (FSFLA) and former
Vice President of the FSFE, about the early starts of free software in
Latin America, the current use of free software in "big tech," and
about support for diversity in different communities.
Fernanda "nanda" Weiden has a long history of personal engagement with
free software and the FSFE. Raised in Porto Alegre, Brasil, Fernanda
organised FISL, the largest free software conference in Latin
America. Later, she became a founding and council member of FSFLA,
before moving to Europe, where she joined the FSFE as a volunteer. She
served as vice president of FSFE from 2009-2011.
GUADEC 2021: Registrations are now open!
From April 8th by the GNOME Project
The GUADEC organizers are pleased to announce that the registrations
for GUADEC 2021 are now open!
GUADEC is the the largest annual gathering of GNOME developers and
community members. This year it will take place on July 21th-25th,
and because of the COVID-19 pandemic it will be online. If you are
planning to attend please register at
https://events.gnome.org/event/9/registrations/34/.
States are moving on privacy bills. Over 4 in 5 voters want the US Congress to prioritize protection of online data.
From April 27th by Sam Sabin
As more US states introduce and consider their own data privacy bills,
public support for Congress to pass a national standard is holding
strong, with 83 percent of voters saying it should be a “top” or
“important, but lower” congressional priority this year.
While Congress continues to punt on a conversation about a national
framework, states have been taking matters into their own hands: at
least 20 states have introduced their own privacy bills this calendar
year alone, according to the International Association of Privacy
Professionals, with Virginia becoming the second state after
California to pass a law in March. And experts are watching longer
legislative sessions in Florida, Colorado, Alaska, Connecticut and New
York for any additional privacy laws this year.
University responds to ban on Linux kernel contributions
From April 22nd by Nathaniel Mott
The University of Minnesota Department of Computer Science and
Engineering announced that it's looking into a ban on contributing to
the Linux kernel that was issued after its research attracted the ire
of the stable release channel's steward.
That ban was issued on Wednesday by Greg Kroah-Hartman, a Linux kernel
developer responsible for the stable channel's release, due to a
project that intentionally added bugs to the Linux kernel in the name
of security research.
Q&A with Grafana Labs CEO Raj Dutt about our licensing changes
From April 20th by Richard "RichiH" Hartmann
When Grafana Labs CEO and co-founder Raj Dutt announced to the team
that the company would be relicensing our core free software projects
from Apache 2.0 to the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPLv3), he
opened the floor for discussion and encouraged anyone who had further
questions to reach out. We believe in honesty and transparency, so we
collected hard questions from Grafanistas, and Raj answered them for
this public Q&A.
Signal CEO cracks Cellebrite iPhone decryption device used by cops
From April 21st by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
One of the biggest encrypted chat apps in the world just showed how a
device used to decrypt messages can be cracked and tampered
with. Cellebrite is a company that sells devices to law enforcement
that uses vulnerabilities in mobile devices to snoop on all of the
data from a phone. Cellebrite devices are used by police to unlock
iPhones in order to gather evidence from encrypted devices. This can
include photos and messages on the device, potentially including
Signal messages. While we're not sure if these devices are currently
useful against Replicant or other free software on mobile devices,
it's important that we all stay informed about stories like this, and
that we remember that any exploit used by law enforcement can be used
by others too.
GCC 11.1 released
From April 27th by GCC
The GNU Compiler Collection includes front ends for C, C++,
Objective-C, Fortran, Ada, Go, and D, as well as libraries for these
languages. GCC was originally written as the compiler for the GNU
operating system. The GNU system was developed to be 100% free
software, free in the sense that it respects the user's freedom.
This release is a major release, containing new features (as well as
many other improvements) relative to GCC 10.x.
April GNU Emacs news
From April 30th by Sacha Chua
In these issues: make use of the Super key; multiple Help buffers; run
shell commands from the minibuffer; a quick introduction to editing
with smartparens; 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 irc.freenode.org, and usually include a handful
of regulars as well as newcomers. Freenode is accessible from any IRC
client -- Everyone's welcome!
The next meeting is Friday, May 7th, from 12pm to 3pm EDT (16:00 to
19:00 UTC). Details here:
LibrePlanet featured resource: Defective by Design/Ideas/Guide
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 Defective by Design/Ideas/Guide,
which invites you to submit suggestions to add to Defective by
Design's DRM-free living guide (items free of Digital Restrictions
Management). 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 [email protected].
GNU Spotlight with Mike Gerwitz: 16 new GNU releases!
16 new GNU releases in the last month (as of May 01, 2021):
For announcements of most new GNU releases, subscribe to the info-gnu
mailing list: https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu.
To download: nearly all GNU software is available from
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/, or preferably one of its mirrors from
https://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html. You can use the URL
https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a
(hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.
A number of GNU packages, as well as the GNU operating system as a
whole, are looking for maintainers and other assistance: please see
https://www.gnu.org/server/takeaction.html#unmaint if you'd like to
help. The general page on how to help GNU is at
https://www.gnu.org/help/help.html.
If you have a working or partly working program that you'd like
to offer to the GNU project as a GNU package, see
https://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html.
FSF and other free software events
Thank GNUs!
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.
This month, a big Thank GNU to:
- Aqua Hill Foundation
- Aram Rae Family
- Casper Freksen
- Catalin Francu
- Chica Burnett Foundation
- Daniel Lloyd-Miller
- Dongjun Lee
- Edward Flick
- Jamss O'Hara
- Jeff Moe
- Kenji Hosoda
- Lee & Heidi Newberg Fund
- Manning Polan Charitable Fund
- Marius Feteanu
- Mathew Woodyard
- Michael and Amy Tiemann
- Pean Lim
- Raffael Stocker
- Rob Teng
- Robert Read
- Rogers-Tanner Family Fund
- Yuchen Pei
You can add your name to this list by donating at
https://donate.fsf.org/.
GNU copyright contributions
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:
- Daniel Díaz (Chess)
- Lê Trung Đan (Emacs)
- Matthew Beshara (Emacs)
- Vitezslav Crhonek (Texinfo)
Want to see your name on this list? Contribute to GNU and assign your
copyright to the FSF.
Translations of the Free Software Supporter
El Free Software Supporter está disponible en español. Para ver la
versión en español haz click aqui:
https://www.fsf.org/free-software-supporter/2021/mayo
Para cambiar las preferencias de usuario y recibir los próximos
números del Supporter en español, haz click aquí:
https://my.fsf.org/civicrm/profile/create?reset=1&gid=34&id=3095323&cs=2331ebb7f463099e600817b17f3ec4bd_1620097120_168
Le Free Software Supporter est disponible en français. Pour voir la
version française cliquez ici:
https://www.fsf.org/free-software-supporter/2021/mai
Pour modifier vos préférences et recevoir les prochaines
publications du Supporter en français, cliquez ici:
https://my.fsf.org/civicrm/profile/create?reset=1&gid=34&id=3095323&cs=2331ebb7f463099e600817b17f3ec4bd_1620097120_168
O Free Software Supporter está disponível em português. Para ver a
versão em português, clique aqui:
https://www.fsf.org/free-software-supporter/2021/maio
Para alterar as preferências do usuário e receber as próximas
edições do Supporter em português, clique aqui:
https://my.fsf.org/civicrm/profile/create?reset=1&gid=34&id=3095323&cs=2331ebb7f463099e600817b17f3ec4bd_1620097120_168
Take action with the FSF!
Contributions from thousands of individual 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:
I'm an FSF member -- Help us support software freedom!
https://my.fsf.org/join
The FSF is always looking for volunteers
(https://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 campaigns section
(https://www.fsf.org/campaigns) and take action on software patents,
Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), free software adoption,
OpenDocument, and more.
#
Copyright © 2021 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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