Recently I was lucky enough to get to travel to Sydney, Australia for Linux Conf Australia (LCA). Along with Free Software Foundation (FSF) executive director John Sullivan, I spent the better part of a week in Sydney, getting to know members of the global free software community I rarely get to see.

LCA is Australasia's grassroots free software conference, organized by Linux Australia. Even though GNU wasn't recognized in the name of the event (which we would love to see!), the spirit of software freedom was felt in sessions covering topics from F-droid to Australian Computing Academy's programs to teach free software languages to students.

In addition to enjoying the coffee, views, summer -- it's winter in Boston -- and food, we most of all enjoyed seeing hundreds of people enthusiastic about free software.

While at LCA I gave a talk entitled "A division of labor: Attempting to measure free software." This compared the results of several surveys of free software communities carried out from 2003-2017. I attempted to see what the data could tell us about who participated in building free software and what they do. A video is available online here.

John Sullivan presented his talk "Freedom embedded: Devices that respect users and communities," which some of you may remember from DebConf 2017. In this, he discusses the Respects Your Freedoms certification program, and devices that run on entirely free software. You can watch the video here.

There were a number of other great talks as well, including some by people you'll be able to see at LibrePlanet 2018.

During the conference, we hosted a lunchtime meetup for FSF members and friends. There was such enthusiasm that we had to move restaurants to accommodate everyone.

Going to LCA was completely worth the twenty-one hour flight from Boston. In addition to everything else, the voices heard at the conference were those of people who work on and advocate for free software every day. Listening to them, meeting them, seeing what they do, and the reminder that I am part of a community is what attending conferences is all about. It was simply inspiring.

Photo credits: Copyright © 2018 Chris Lamb, photo licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0; copyright © 2018 Free Software Foundation, photo licensed under CC-BY 4.0.

Help improve the Free Software Directory by adding new entries and updating existing ones. Every Friday we meet on IRC in the #fsf channel on irc.freenode.org.

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 providing detailed info about version control, IRC channels, documentation, and licensing info that has been carefully checked by FSF staff and trained volunteers.

When a user comes to the Directory, they know that everything in it is free software, has only free dependencies, and runs on a free OS. With over 16,000 entries, it is a massive repository of information about free software.

While the Directory has been and continues to be a great resource to the world for many years now, it has the potential to be a resource of even greater value. But it needs your help! And since it's a MediaWiki instance, it's easy for anyone to edit and contribute to the Directory.

In 1870, the US Army created the National Weather Service, which is still with us to this day, providing essential monitoring and evaluation of meteorological conditions. Currently, the Directory has many entries related to weather. A good number of them have outdated information and could use a refresh, and there is newer software employing the last features of the new single point releases of the larger graphic toolkits. As always, working on the unapproved entries is important work that we can winnow down.

If you are eager to help, and you can't wait or are simply unable to make it onto IRC on Friday, our participation guide will provide you with all the information you need to get started on helping the Directory today! There are also weekly Directory Meeting pages that everyone is welcome to contribute to before, during, and after each meeting.

• coreutils-8.29
• gdbm-1.14.1
• gnuhealth-client-3.2.5
• gnustep-gui-0.26.2
• gnutls-3.5.17
• gzip-1.9
• libcdio-2.0.0
• libsigsegv-2.12
• libtasn1-4.13
• linux-libre-4.14.15-gnu
• mpc-1.1.0
• mpfr-4.0.0
• nano-2.9.2
• parallel-20180122
• servletapi-3.0.1
• unifont-10.0.07
• vcdimager-2.0.1
• wget-1.19.4

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.

As always, please feel free to write to us at maintainers@gnu.org with any GNUish questions or suggestions for future installments.

Help improve the Free Software Directory by adding new entries and updating existing ones. Every Friday we meet on IRC in the #fsf channel on irc.freenode.org.

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 providing detailed info about version control, IRC channels, documentation, and licensing info that has been carefully checked by FSF staff and trained volunteers.

When a user comes to the Directory, they know that everything in it is free software, has only free dependencies, and runs on a free OS. With over 16,000 entries, it is a massive repository of information about free software.

While the Directory has been and continues to be a great resource to the world for many years now, it has the potential to be a resource of even greater value. But it needs your help! And since it's a MediaWiki instance, it's easy for anyone to edit and contribute to the Directory.

This week we're back to growing the Directory even larger with new entries. There's still so much free software out there that isn't listed that even with the 16,000 entries we already have, there's a long ways to go. We'll also be scouting for a team captain to take the lead on the Directory import project, which, once completed, will really boost the total number of listed packages.

If you are eager to help, and you can't wait or are simply unable to make it onto IRC on Friday, our participation guide will provide you with all the information you need to get started on helping the Directory today! There are also weekly Directory Meeting pages that everyone is welcome to contribute to before, during, and after each meeting.

LibreJS is a Web browser plugin that protects the freedom of its users by blocking nonfree JavaScript code. Recent Mozilla-based browsers are supported on GNU/Linux and other major desktop operating systems. We encourage everyone to use the new plugin with the latest version of Abrowser, a browser that ships with Trisquel GNU/Linux. IceCat support will be available once version 60 is released.

The new version of LibreJS comes with the following improvements over the previous version:

• Web pages load very quickly, by analyzing each file independently.
• Enabling and disabling the plugin does not require a browser restart.
• It is compatible with WebExtensions, and thus newer Mozilla-based browsers, including Abrowser and a future version of IceCat.

The new version of LibreJS is available for download here.

Nathan Nichols pushed the new version of LibreJS forward as the primary coder and maintainer. Nathan deserves our thanks for improving LibreJS, and thereby helping the free software community.

As the the Web continues to grow in importance, we must continue to improve user freedom on the Web. The primary aim of the free software movement is to release all code as free software, and that includes all JavaScript.

Nonfree JavaScript denies us control of our computing by denying us the freedom to use it for any purpose, and to modify and share the code that runs locally in our browsers. Sites that don't provide freely licensed JavaScript with human-readable source code don't respect our freedom, and the FSF discourages their use. That's where LibreJS comes into play, as it ensures that that the JavaScript we do use is free software, by checking licenses and blocking nonfree JavaScript.

Nonfree JavaScript is not the only freedom-related issue on the Web. It is part of a broader concern about services that are "SaaSS," or "service as a software substitute", and thus nonfree.

Many others have contributed to LibreJS in the past, including Loic J. Duros, Nik Nyby, and Ethan Dorta, an FSF summer intern. Anyone interested in assisting with the maintenance of the project is welcome to get involved.