# Free Software Supporter Issue 103, November 2016 Welcome to the Free Software Supporter, the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) monthly news digest and action update -- being read by you and 121,941 other activists. That's 2,642 more than last month! ### The FSF seeks nominations for the 19th annual Free Software Awards due November 6th! *From October 11th* The FSF and the GNU Project call upon the free software community to submit nominations for the 19th annual Free Software Awards. The Free Software Awards include the Award for the Advancement of Free Software and the Award for Projects of Social Benefit. The awards are presented each year at the LibrePlanet free software conference. * * ### Reminder: LibrePlanet call for papers is open *From September 27th* This year, the theme of LibrePlanet is "The Roots of Freedom." This encompasses the historical "roots" of the free software movement -- the Four Freedoms, the GNU General Public License and copyleft, and a focus on strong security and privacy protections -- and the concept of roots as a strong foundation from which the movement grows. **Call for sessions applications are currently being accepted and are due by Wednesday, November 16th, 2016 at 18:59 EST (23:59 UTC).** * ## TABLE OF CONTENTS * Register now for LibrePlanet 2017: "The Roots of Freedom" March 25-26, 2017 in Boston, MA * Licensing resource series: How to choose a license for your own work * We called on you to tell the U.S. Copyright Office that Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) anti-circumvention rules are broken * A photoblog of Richard Stallman receiving an honorary doctorate * Judge Mayer provides a strong case against software patents in *Intellectual Ventures v. Symantec* * Photos from Libre Learn Lab, in Cambridge * Tim Berners-Lee just gave us an opening to stop DRM in Web standards * Karen Sandler delivered keynote at OSCON EU, taught kids in London about free software * Interview with Ali Miracle: a visually impaired free software warrior and developer from Iraq * An Emacs update... experience from a non-developer * Second Roundtable on hateful and harassing speech online * ActivityPub and MediaGoblin at Technical Plenary / Advisory Committee (TPAC) 2016 * October Free Software Directory meeting recaps * Join the FSF and friends in updating the Free Software Directory * LibrePlanet featured resource: Design * GNU Spotlight with Brandon Invergo: Nineteen new GNU releases! * Richard Stallman's speaking schedule and other FSF events * Thank GNUs! * GNU copyright contributions * Take action with the FSF! View this issue online here: Encourage your friends to subscribe and help us build an audience by adding our subscriber widget to your Web site. * Subscribe: * Widget: Miss an issue? You can catch up on back issues at . ### El Free Software Supporter está disponible en español. Para ver la versión en español haz click aquí: **Para cambiar las preferencias de usuario y recibir los próximos números del Supporter en español, haz click aquí:** Le Free Software Supporter est disponible en français. Pour voir la version française cliquez ici: **Pour modifier vos préférences et recevoir les prochaines publications du Supporter en français, cliquez ici:** ### Register now for LibrePlanet 2017: "The Roots of Freedom" March 25-26, 2017 in Boston, MA *From October 6th* Clear your calendars for the last weekend of March 2017! Registration for LibrePlanet is now open. The conference will be held March 25-26, 2017, in the Boston area. Sign up today! * ### Licensing resource series: How to choose a license for your own work *From October 27th* We provide plenty of resources when it comes to picking a license. From our list of licenses to essays on copyleft, if you are looking to figure out what license is right for you there is plenty of information to rely upon. But this month's resource helps to pull that information together in one place to make selecting a license simple. * ### We called on you to tell the U.S. Copyright Office that Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) anti-circumvention rules are broken *From October 26th* The U.S. Copyright Office was taking comments on making some exemptions from the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions permanent. We recapped our past actions and called on you to support the existing petition by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. * ### A photoblog of Richard Stallman receiving an honorary doctorate *From October 20th* RMS received an honorary doctorate from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC), in Paris, France. In anticipation of the merger between the UPMC and the Université Paris-Sorbonne, which will be finalized in January 2018, the two institutions organized, in the great amphitheater of the Sorbonne, a joint ceremony that recognized both achievers in the sciences and in medicine, as well as ones in the arts and the humanities. Take a look at RMS receiving the doctorate! * ### Judge Mayer provides a strong case against software patents in *Intellectual Ventures v. Symantec* *From October 18th* The FSF has argued for years via our End Software Patents campaign that software patents are a threat to computer users everywhere and need to be abolished. And now a Federal Circuit concurrence makes the case that software is not a patentable subject matter. * ### Photos from Libre Learn Lab, in Cambridge *From October 12th* RMS was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the Libre Learn Lab, a summit “for people who create and implement freely licensed resources for education, bringing together educators, policy experts, software developers, hardware hackers, and activists to share best practices and address the challenges of widespread adoption of these resources in education.” He was one of the keynote speakers and, on October 8th, gave his speech “Education for Freedom with Free (Libre) Software." * ### Tim Berners-Lee just gave us an opening to stop DRM in Web standards *From October 6th* Tim Berners-Lee decided not to exercise his power to extend the development timeline for the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) Web technology standard. The EME standardization effort, sponsored by streaming giants like Google and Netflix, aims to make it cheaper and more efficient to impose Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) systems on Web users. The streaming companies' representatives within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) were unable to finish EME within the time allotted by the W3C, and had asked Berners-Lee for an extension through next year. * ### Karen Sandler delivered keynote at OSCON EU, taught kids in London about free software *From October 26th by Software Freedom Conservancy* Conservancy's executive director Karen Sandler delivered a keynote last week in London, England at OSCON EU. Karen discussed software freedom ideology and its place relative to social justice issues. Drawing from her experiences looking at medical devices, Karen illustrated software freedom as a threshold issue, at the service of those bigger challenges. Karen stated the case for why software must be free in order to solve our biggest social problems effectively in the long-term. * ### Interview with Ali Miracle: a visually impaired free software warrior and developer from Iraq *From October 8th by Steven Johns* For most of us, software development isn't a difficult industry to enter. Many of us are able people that live in places with affordable internet access or have access to education streams that can be accessed. We can easily get a hold of resources like textbooks and complete lessons on websites without much difficulty, well, sometimes with JavaScript. These things are out of reach to the majority of people around the world, and they are even further out of reach for those of us who have impairments and disabilities. One of these people is Ali Abdul Ghani, a visually impaired software developer and self-described free software activist from Baghdad, Iraq. * ### An Emacs update... experience from a non-developer *From October 9th by Charles-H. Schulz* I’m no software developer. When I’m not maintaining or creating websites for friends, I’m not doing much else in the way of “coding.” My Emacs usage remains, however, a daily experience that I would like to share here. * ### Second Roundtable on hateful and harassing speech online *From October 7th by Software Freedom Law Centre - India* Over the course of this discussion, it was highlighted that it is indeed difficult to capture the contours of online harassment and hate speech in definite terms, as the line between legitimate and abusive uses of the freedom of expression is subjective. In addition, social media is often the chosen platform for powerful players to further their propaganda, and these positions of power are at times used to popularize certain kinds of opinions at the expense of others. With regards to free speech and expression in the online space, anonymity poses a unique conundrum, where on one hand it facilitates free and open discourse amongst vulnerable groups and minorities, while on the other, it is used as a mask by the perpetrators of harassing and abusive speech. * ### ActivityPub and MediaGoblin at Technical Plenary / Advisory Committee (TPAC) 2016 *From October 5th by Christopher Allan Webber* It seems a recurring meme in MediaGoblin land to say “we’ve been quiet, because we’ve been busy” (or maybe historically on every tech blog ever), but I guess I can’t resist repeating the mantra. It’s true! Though the weight of my focus has been shifted from where I expected it to be. From the last few updates over the last year, you would be right to anticipate that the main thing I would be working on would be merging the federation code Jessica has written and getting 1.0 out the door. That was the plan, and we’re still working towards that, but priorities shifted as we realized the opportunities and time pressures we were under with ActivityPub. * ### October Free Software Directory meeting recaps Check out the great work our volunteers accomplished at the October Free Software Directory meetings. Every week free software activists from around the world come together in #fsf on irc.gnu.org to help improve the Free Software Directory. *October 7th meeting* * *October 14th meeting* * *October 21st meeting* * ### 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.gnu.org, and usually include a handful of regulars as well as newcomers. Everyone's welcome. The next meeting is Friday, November 4th from 1pm to 4pm EDT (17:00 to 20:00 UTC). Details here: * ### LibrePlanet featured resource: Design 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 Design ideas in free software projects, which is a space to share ideas and examples of good free software design. 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 . ### GNU Spotlight with Brandon Invergo: Nineteen new GNU releases! * [freeipmi-1.5.4](https://www.gnu.org/software/freeipmi/) * [gdb-7.12](https://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/) * [gnuastro-0.2](https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro/) * [gnuhealth-3.0.4](http://health.gnu.org/) * [gnun-0.11](https://www.gnu.org/software/gnun/) * [grep-2.26](https://www.gnu.org/software/grep/) * [guile-2.0.13](https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/) * [guile-ncurses-2.0](https://www.gnu.org/software/guile-ncurses/) * [libcdio-0.94](https://www.gnu.org/software/libcdio/) * [libmicrohttpd-0.9.52](https://www.gnu.org/software/libmicrohttpd/) * [linux-libre-4.8-gnu](https://www.gnu.org/software/linux-libre/) * [mpfr-3.1.5](https://www.gnu.org/software/mpfr/) * [nettle-3.3](https://www.gnu.org/software/nettle/) * [parallel-20161022](https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/) * [pies-1.3](https://www.gnu.org/software/pies/) * [rush-1.8](https://www.gnu.org/software/rush/) * [taler-0.1.0](https://www.gnu.org/software/taler/) * [unifont-9.0.03](https://www.gnu.org/software/unifont/) * [zile-2.4.13](https://www.gnu.org/software/zile/) For announcements of most new GNU releases, subscribe to the info-gnu mailing list: . To download: nearly all GNU software is available from , or preferably one of its mirrors from . You can use the url to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror. This month, we welcome Tyhender as the new MetaHTML maintainer, and Adrien Béraud and Alexandre Viau as the maintainers of the new package GNU Ring. A number of GNU packages, as well as the GNU operating system as a whole, are looking for maintainers and other assistance: please see if you'd like to help. The general page on how to help GNU is at . If you have a working or partly working program that you'd like to offer to the GNU project as a GNU package, see . As always, please feel free to write to us at with any GNUish questions or suggestions for future installments. ### Richard Stallman's speaking schedule and other FSF events For event details, as well as to sign-up to be notified for future events in your area, please visit . So far, Richard Stallman has the following events this month: * November 10, Lisbon, Portugal, ["Should We Have More Surveillance Than the USSR?"](https://www.fsf.org/events/rms-20161110-lisbon-iscte) * November 10, Lisbon, Portugal, ["Reclaim Your Freedom with Free (Libre) Software"](https://www.fsf.org/events/rms-20161110-lisbon) * November 11, Barcelona, Spain, ["El Software Libre y Tu Libertad"](https://www.fsf.org/events/rms-20161111-barcelona) * November 18, Las Palmas, Spain, ["GNU Health Con 2016"](https://www.fsf.org/events/rms-20161118-laspalmasdegrancanaria) * November 26, Seville, Spain, ["¿Tenemos que soportar más vigilancia que en la Unión Soviética?"](https://www.fsf.org/events/rms-20161126-seville) * November 29, Salamanca, Spain, ["El software libre en la ética y en la práctica"](https://www.fsf.org/events/rms-20161129-salamanca) * November 30, Alcala de Henares, Spain, ["El título y la hora de la charla serán determinados"](https://www.fsf.org/events/rms-20161130-alcaladehenares) ### Other FSF and free software events * November 12, Seattle, WA, ["Free Software Foundation: Volunteer Empire"](https://osem.seagl.org/conference/seagl2016/program/proposal/186) * November 16-17, Paris, France, ["Freedom Embedded: Devices that Respect Users and Communities"](http://www.opensourcesummit.paris/) * November 18-20, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, ["GNU Health Con 2016"](https://www.fsf.org/events/event-20161118-laspalmas-gnuhealthcon) ### 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: * René Genz * Steven Hay You can add your name to this list by donating at . ### GNU copyright contributions Assigning your copyright to the Free Software Foundation helps us defend the GPL and keep software free. The following individuals have assigned their copyright to the FSF in the past month: * Akash Trehan (GDB) * James W Rinn (GnuCOBOL) * Ismail Goktug Kayaalp (Emacs) * Felix Lange (Emacs) * Tianxiang Xiong (Emacs) Want to see your name on this list? Contribute to GNU and assign your copyright to the FSF. ### Take action with the FSF! Contributions from thousands of individual members enable the FSF's work. You can contribute by joining at . 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! The FSF is also always looking for volunteers (). 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 () and take action on software patents, DRM, free software adoption, OpenDocument, Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and more. ### Copyright © 2016 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 .