Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Free Software Supporter, Issue 44, November 2011

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.

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.

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.

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,

51 Franklin Street
Fifth Floor
Boston, MA 02110-1335
United States

You can unsubscribe to this mailing-list by visiting the link http://crm.fsf.org/index.php?q=civicrm/mailing/unsubscribe&reset=1&jid=125436&qid=912277&h=e2f8a86fcc8f86f0.

To stop all email from the Free Software Foundation, including Defective by Design,
and the Free Software Supporter newsletter, click this link:

http://crm.fsf.org/index.php?q=civicrm/mailing/optout&reset=1&jid=125436&qid=912277&h=e2f8a86fcc8f86f0.

Posted by at No comments:

Friday, November 11, 2011

In the US: Please join us on November 16th for American Censorship Day

American Censorship Day is Wednesday, November 16th: http://americancensorship.org

When you visit http://fsf.org this Wednesday, November 16th, you won't see the usual site. Instead, you'll see a preview of what the site could look like in the future, if we were accused of copyright infringement by companies who routinely manipulate copyright law to attack free expression and sharing on the Internet -- values fundamental to the free software movement.

You've probably heard that Old Media is trying to push through legislation that would obligate the US government to blacklist and censor sites they accuse of copyright infringement. This legislation is called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and PROTECT IP in the Senate -- it is no surprise that groups pushing hard to take away the public's freedom picked an analogy to raping and pillaging for one bill and the manipulative terminology of "intellectual property" for the other.

We've stopped bills like this before, but we didn't do it by sitting on our hands.

If you have a web site, I urge you to join us and our colleagues at organizations like Fight for the Future, EFF, Public Knowledge, Demand Progress, and the Participatory Politics Foundation, as we blacklist ourselves for a day to make it abundantly clear what the Internet will look like if this legislation passes.

If you don't have a web site, you can still help! Take action by writing to your representatives in the House and Senate, and help spread the word to your friends and colleagues.

Participate in American Censorship Day:

Spread the word:

Learn more about the issue:

Thank you for doing your part,

John Sullivan
Executive Director
Free Software Foundation


--
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,

51 Franklin Street
Fifth Floor
Boston, MA 02110-1335
United States

You can unsubscribe to this mailing-list by visiting the link http://crm.fsf.org/index.php?q=civicrm/mailing/unsubscribe&reset=1&jid=125378&qid=839036&h=4b00b87636c5991e.

To never receive email from the Free Software Foundation, including Defective by Design,
our monthly newsletter and more, click this link:

http://crm.fsf.org/index.php?q=civicrm/mailing/optout&reset=1&jid=125378&qid=839036&h=4b00b87636c5991e.

Posted by at No comments:

Friday, November 4, 2011

[FSF] Stop the Internet Blacklist legislation

Join us, EFF, Demand Progress, and Fight for The Future in opposing the latest round of Internet Blacklist legislation.

Take action and sign petitions on the following sites:

The EFF explains the legislation, which is titled the PROTECT-IP Act in the Senate and SOPA in the House, as follows:

As drafted, the legislation would grant the government and private parties unprecedented power to interfere with the Internet's domain name system (DNS). The government would be able to force ISPs and search engines to redirect or dump users' attempts to reach certain websites' URLs. In response, third parties will woo average users to alternative servers that offer access to the entire Internet (not just the newly censored U.S. version), which will create new computer security vulnerabilities as the reliability and universality of the DNS evaporates.

It gets worse: Under SOPA's provisions, service providers (including hosting services) would be under new pressure to monitor and police their users’ activities. While PROTECT-IP targeted sites “dedicated to infringing activities,” SOPA targets websites that simply don’t do enough to track and police infringement (and it is not at all clear what would be enough). And it creates new powers to shut down folks who provide tools to help users get access to the Internet the rest of the world sees (not just the “U.S. authorized version”).

This legislation is an example of the severely flawed thinking you get when approaching issues in terms of "intellectual property".

We helped stop this bill before, but now it's back under a different name. Please take a minute and help stop this one too!

 

In Solidarity,

Josh, John, Matt, and Richard


--
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,

51 Franklin Street
Fifth Floor
Boston, MA 02110-1335
United States

You can unsubscribe to this mailing-list by visiting the link http://crm.fsf.org/index.php?q=civicrm/mailing/unsubscribe&reset=1&jid=125354&qid=791758&h=68ab2f8622230ab3.

To never receive email from the Free Software Foundation, including Defective by Design,
our monthly newsletter and more, click this link:

http://crm.fsf.org/index.php?q=civicrm/mailing/optout&reset=1&jid=125354&qid=791758&h=68ab2f8622230ab3.

Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Comments (Atom)