[FSF] Part 2: We want to do more for you!

We've raised $107,694!
Can you help us reach our goal of $300,000 by January 31st?
Become an associate member for just $120 or $10/month

 

Thank goodness the FSF does not pay our founder and president, Richard M. Stallman (RMS). We couldn't afford him!

This year, RMS delivered over 100 talks in two dozen countries. He met with students, teachers, policymakers, and the general public, giving presentations in English, Spanish, and French. He addressed a variety of topics from the dangers of software patents to building a free digital society.

Somehow RMS also squeezed in time to write articles for the Guardian and Huffington Post, gave dozens of statements to press around the world, and responded to more email in a year than the average person will in a decade. Oh, and he wrote a little code too.

So you might ask, what is RMS's secret to being so productive while managing an insane travel and speaking schedule?

A big part of the answer: FSF staff member, Jeanne Rasata.

Jeanne's job title may officially be stated as "assistant to the president," but would you call Robin the assistant to Batman? Of course not.

She's a superhero in her own right!

Jeanne not only helps in coordinating and planning RMS's grueling travel and speaking schedule -- which often involves communicating in several different languages with event organizers -- she is also the front-line of communication for nearly all email sent to the FSF, and is our virtual front-desk for questions and requests from FSF associate members. (With over 40% of our funding coming from our members, this is no small task!) In her, um, remaining time, she's managed to start a new habit of sharing photos and accounts from some of the events she's helped to organize:

• Compilation from various cities
• Mexico
• Sweden
• UK

But, like a true superhero, Jeanne is not content with simply doing well in a demanding job. She wants to do a lot more for free software.

After editing the second edition of Free Software, Free Society last year (yes, she edits books too), Jeanne is eager to see this and other FSF publications translated into more languages. As a polyglot, she has the training and skills to tackle such a task, but, does she have the time?

After six years of interacting with members and free software activists around the globe, Jeanne knows the problems and challenges that individuals face when they first start getting into free software. She knows we can do better in publishing more comprehensive and multilingual sets of educational materials. But should she have to try to do it alone?

Support Jeanne's mission to do more for free software

From her secret home base in Germany, Jeanne helped the FSF accomplish a lot around the world this year for free software. But, next year, we want to support her in being able to do even more.

You can support this goal by helping us reach the fundraising target of $300,000 by January 31st. If we meet this goal, we will be confident that our existing program expenses will be covered until this time next year, and we can focus on how best to start doing more.

• Become an associate member  for just $120 or $10/month**
• Donate any amount
• Add our fundraising widget to your site or blog
• And simply let your friends and co-workers know about our fundraiser! 

**But you might consider pitching in $20/month to cover the cost of all those unpaid superhero sidekicks out there!

 

Your friends, 

Josh, Brett, Donald, Jasimin, Jeanne, John, Martin, Matt, Peter, Richard, and Ward

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[FSF] We want to do more for you!

Help us raise $300,000 for free software by January 31st.

• Join: https://my.fsf.org/associate/support_freedom

With your support this past year, we made a difference and accomplished a great deal for free software around the world. But we don't just want to repeat this in 2012 — we want to make an even bigger impact, and we need your help to do it.

To reach our fundraising goal, we need to raise just $229,000 more over the next seven weeks. If we meet this goal, we will be confident that our existing program expenses will be covered for the remainder of the year, and we can focus on how best to start doing more.

You can help us get there by joining -- an FSF membership is $120/year, which is $10/month or 33 cents per day. Note that while you can contribute $10 or more automatically each month, we cannot yet automatically collect your 33 cents each day.

• Join: https://my.fsf.org/associate/support_freedom

Who we are and what we do

Last year we helped arrange over 110 events around the world, including our annual LibrePlanet conference. We responded to well over 14,000 email requests from our members, reporters, and the broader public. We gathered tens of thousands of signatures, and broke stories on computer user freedom into the mainstream media. We helped people learn about getting started with free software, and ran educational advocacy campaigns about the efforts of major corporations to eliminate free software. We took in over 100 new copyright assignments for the GNU Project, replied to over ten times that many free software licensing questions, and provided important distribution and development infrastructure for GNU hackers. We offered feedback to organizations and standards bodies, and gave guidance on legislation and policies being enacted around the world. We run a store and publishing company out of our office, shipping freely licensed books, printed t-shirts, and stickers to dozens of countries.

"The FSF is a small, humble organization of passionate individuals working tirelessly for our software freedom."

Benjamin Mako Hill, FSF board of directors

But we want to do more — a lot more. And the only way that can happen is if you help us grow.

The Free Software Foundation is a staff of ten dedicated and effective individuals, working with a global network of volunteers and supporters of the free software movement. Our president, Richard Stallman, does not receive a salary from the FSF. Every person and function in our organization is pushed to its capacity, and to do more, we need to grow.

Each week until the end of our fundraiser on January 31st, we will be presenting you short focus pieces detailing our work and our desire to do even more for you!

The goal of our fundraiser is to raise $300,000 for free software. Our goal as an organization is to spend your donations wisely and effectively, so that we can do our very best on your behalf at defending the rights of computer users around the world and encouraging free software development.

How you can help

• Join: https://my.fsf.org/associate/support_freedom
• Donate: https://my.fsf.org/donate
• Add our fundraising widget to your site or blog: https://my.fsf.org/associate/widget
• And simply let your friends and co-workers know about our fundraiser! http://www.fsf.org/appeal/2011/we-want-to-do-more-for-you

Sincerely,

Josh, Brett, Donald, Jasimin, Jeanne, John, Martin, Matt, Peter, Richard, and Ward

PS. If you are in the US, please call your representatives this week to stop the Internet blacklist legislation, SOPA, from becoming a law! Visit http://fsf.org and follow the instructions on the pop-up window (if you do not see the pop-up, clear your cache and refresh).

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Help us make LibrePlanet 2012 a success!

The dates have been announced for our next conference -- March 24th and 25th 2012, at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. A call for papers has also been announced. The conference will include talks from the FSF staff and board, GNU project contributors, and other members of the global free software community. I hope you will join us!

Since 2009, the Free Software Foundation has run an annual conference in the Boston area for free software developers, activists, and the FSF's own associate members. This conference grew out of a smaller members-only event which ran successfully for six years.

The conference has featured many free software luminaries over the years, including FSF president Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen of the Freedom Box Foundation and Software Freedom Law Center, EFF co-founder John Gilmore, GNOME Foundation executive director Karen Sandler, Jeremy Allison of the Samba project, Selena Deckelmann of PostgreSQL, Máirín Duffy of Fedora, and veteran GNU developer Rob Savoye.

We are planning the upcoming conference in the midst of our annual winter fundraiser, the time of year when we work the hardest at inviting new people to become FSF associate members. Our associate members are the most important means of financial support for the Free Software Foundation -- individuals in our community, making a financial commitment to software freedom. Because we want the conference to be an opportunity for these free software supporters to meet each other, our associate members can attend the conference without charge.

At last year's event, I promised we would make this conference bigger and better than ever before. As I and the other staff work hard to bring some of the pioneers of our community together, we are relying on your contributions to help make the financial aspect of this event possible, without hanging ugly corporate banners everywhere.

We just need 100 new members, and the conference is paid for entirely. Funding is necessary for us to provide a comfortable venue, devote enough staff time to promote it and have it run smoothly, and offer other features like audio and video recordings of the talks for future use.

• Chip in by becoming an associate member.

• Already a member? Thank you! If you can, give a gift membership or three, or make a one-time donation. A gift membership is especially great if you have a friend who's on the fence about coming to the conference.

• Finally, please join the mailing list for updates and be the first to get your ticket for LibrePlanet 2012.

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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.

• 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.

• http://fsf.org/blogs/licensing/amazons-kindle-source-code-much-ado-about-nothing

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.

• http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/announcing-debugging-with-gdb-tenth-edition-for-version-7.3.1

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.

• http://www.defectivebydesign.org/holiday

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.

• http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/20110530-fsm-sanjuandelrio

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.

• http://fsf.org/blogs/membership/this-holiday-season-donate-support-to-free-software

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!).

• http://ur1.ca/67wng

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.

• http://fsfe.org/news/2011/news-20111128-01.en.html

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.

• http://libreplanet.org/wiki/LibrePlanet2012/CFP

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.

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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:

• http://americancensorship.org/

Spread the word:

• On Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/m7zan/the_mpaa_will_soon_be_able_to_block_americans/

• On your social networks (many are using the #blacklist tag): http://www.fsf.org/share?u=http://americancensorship.org&t=Stop%20the%20Internet%20Blacklist!

Learn more about the issue:

• https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/sopa-hollywood-finally-gets-chance-break-Internet
• http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/10/house-takes-senates-bad-internet-censorship-bill-makes-it-worse.ars
• http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html

Thank you for doing your part,

John Sullivan
Executive Director
Free Software Foundation

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[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:

• EFF
• Demand Progress
• Fight For the Future

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

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