Welcome to the Free Software Supporter, the Free Software
Foundation's (FSF) monthly news digest and action update -- being read
by you and 230,566 other activists. That's 253 more than last month!
LibrePlanet 2023 will be held March 18-19, CFS extended to November 23
From November 2
The dates for LibrePlanet 2023 have been announced: March 18-19,
2023. Along with this, the deadline for the Call for Sessions has been
extended to November 23. And, if you need advice or encouragement as
you prepare your talk proposal, we're here to help! We will host one
more #libreplanet IRC (Libera.Chat) LibrePlanet Call for Sessions
office hours with FSF staff and LibrePlanet committee members. Join us
on Thursday, November 10 from 13:00 to 14:00 EST (18:00 to 19:00 UTC)
Want to read this newsletter translated into another language? Scroll
to the end to read the Supporter in French or Spanish.
Privacy and freedom should be the legacy we leave, not the opposite
From October 21
October 21 marked Global Encryption Day this year, and in honor of
this day, we published an article about the important role end-to-end
encryption plays in our daily privacy. So called "chat control
measures" in the European Union (EU) seem dangerously close to adoption, however, their
reasoning is flawed. Encryption, like a door lock, is a useful tool, and
mandatory backdoors only introduce an unnecessary insecurity for
users. Looking to future generations, freedom and privacy should be
the legacy that we leave children, not a technological infrastructure
that deprives them of these rights, or worse, implies that they never
existed in the first place. Having the best of intentions doesn't
matter: once the backdoor is open, there's no closing it. Protecting
children from harm is as noble of a goal as it always was, but placing
backdoors in how we talk and share isn't the way to go about it.
Contribute to the free software movement: Intern at the FSF! Apply by November 10
From October 18
The FSF is looking for interns to spend the
winter contributing to work in one of three areas: campaigns,
licensing, or with our tech team. Do you believe that free software is
crucial to a free society? Do you want to help people learn why free
software matters, and how to use it? Do you want to dig deep into
software freedom issues like copyleft, Digital Restrictions Management
(DRM), or surveillance and encryption? Or, do you want to learn
systems administration and other technical tasks using only free
software? Apply by November 10.
The GTI Project -- A conversation and community Q&A
From October 24
The FSF hosted a conversation and community Q&A with the
maintainers behind the proposal on changing the infrastructure
that the GNU Toolchain projects (among others) use. The Linux
Foundation, the Sourceware volunteers, and wider community were
also invited. The event was an opportunity to ask the important
questions that maintainers, volunteers, and community members
have raised about the proposal. The video for the event, which
was broadcast live on October 24, was published later that same
day, and is available on our media archive.
The latest stable version of GNU Make, version 4.4, has been released
and is available for download from the File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
directory. This version has new features such as .WAIT and
.NOTPARALLEL special targets, improved support for load average, and
non-deterministic "shuffle." Please see the NEWS file that comes with
the GNU Make distribution for details on user-visible changes.
If enforced, EU chat control will limit free software
From October 26 by Free Software Foundation Europe
Free software affords users and developers alike the freedoms to run,
copy, distribute, study, change, and improve the software. However,
the current EU draft legislation on mandatory "chat control" threatens
these freedoms by prohibiting methods of securing privacy with
encryption. Moreover, free software tools, by virtue of their
transparent and shareable nature, would be under additional burdens to
follow such mandates, while the proposed law will fail its intended
goal of protecting people and, at worst, introduce people to security
vulnerabilities that will allow easy surveillance and spying.
Toward practical transparent verifiable and long-term reproducible research using Guix
From October 4 by Nicolas Vallet, David Michonneau, & Simon Tournier
In the field of science, reproducibility is crucial. However,
reproducibility requires controls over things such as experimental
conditions. When such conditions require software, free software such
as GNU Guix is the only practical way to ensure that the necessary
experimental controls are in place. GNU Guix provides a unique packaging
system, and the computational environment for testing can be recorded
and tracked by the Git version control system so that anyone who would
like to reproduce the computational conditions can do so, and can do
so for various points in the environment's history. It is not every
day that free software is examined in academia, and this article
offers persuasive evidence for its critical role in scientific
research.
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, November 4 from 12pm to 3pm EDT (16:00 to
19:00 UTC). Details here:
LibrePlanet featured resource: Lightning talks for LibrePlanet 2023
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 lightning talks for LibrePlanet
2023, which provides information about how to submit a lightning talk
to next year's LibrePlanet. Check it out, submit a talk if you like,
and consider helping us spread the word. Talks can either be submitted
pre-recorded or as slides for a live in-person presentation at
LibrePlanet.
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 using
https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a
(hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.
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:
Daniel Pettersson (GNU Emacs)
Elias Storms (GNU Emacs)
Arun Isaacjameschellakumar (GNU Emacs)
Sean Farley (GNU Emacs)
Andrea Giovanni Monaco (GNU Emacs)
Roman Rudakov (GNU Emacs)
Gregory Martin Pfeil (GNU Emacs)
Eli Qian (GNU Emacs)
Wei-Fang Sun (GDB, GNU Binutils)
Danny Yihan He (GNU Emacs)
Faezeh Bidjarchian (Gnuastro)
Daniel Robert Ziltener (GNU Emacs)
Daniel Freeman (GNU Emacs)
Niall Dooley (GNU Emacs, GNU Guix)
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 Free Software Supporter. Please send an email to
[email protected] with your interest and a list of your experience
and qualifications.
