In this edition, we conducted an email-based interview with Jonathan Thomas, the developer of the OpenShot Video Editor. The current version was just released at the end of Spring 2017. This was one of the biggest updates ever to OpenShot, and was filled with new features, performance improvements, and tons of bug fixes!

First off, tell us a little about yourself.

My name is Jonathan Thomas, and I am Texas-based software developer who has invested the past 9 years building OpenShot Video Editor. OpenShot is a free software video editor for GNU/Linux. It creates films, edit videos, builds amazing animations, all with a simple user interface and a few clicks. I actually live in rural Texas (about an hour away from Dallas), on a ranch near cows, horses, sheep, goats, and donkeys. We get our Internet via a radio antenna on the side of our house. It's a fun and strange combination of outdoors and high tech.

What inspired you to create OpenShot?

I have loved creating videos and short films for as long as I can remember. About 9 years ago, I discovered GNU/Linux and fell in love. After many failed attempts creating a video with existing free software projects, I decided I would just develop my own video editor (or at least attempt to). It was a huge challenge, and I was almost certainly going to fail, but as I said, I love video editing, and I just couldn't resist the adventure.

Fast forward back to present and OpenShot is used by millions of people around the world, taught in schools, published in textbooks and magazines, and getting more popular each day. I am still shocked by how quickly it has grown, and I'm thrilled others are enjoying my work and passion.

How are people using it?

OpenShot is used primarily by hobbyists, free software enthusiasts, and students. It has been used on a huge variety of projects ranging from commercials to local public television station and college productions. I can't forget to mention it has been used on my own projects.

What features do you think really sets OpenShot apart from similar software?

One of the biggest challenges with video editing software is how complex the user interface tends to be. Hundreds of buttons, sliders, curve editors, panels, menus, tracks, stacked toolbars, multiple video players, and so forth. With OpenShot, I have attempted to keep things as simple as possible, while still enabling many advanced and awesome capabilities. Minimal buttons, well organized menus, and lots of preset animations and effects. Using OpenShot, you can trim a video, add a soundtrack, watermark, and animate some moving text with just a few clicks. No training needed.

Why did you choose GNU General Public License version 3 as OpenShot's license?

I selected the GPLv3 license to encourage contributions, and establish a strong identity. It just spoke to me, and it seemed to accomplish what I was needing.

How can users (technical or otherwise) help contribute to OpenShot?

We are always looking for help with OpenShot, in any areas people are interested in contributing. Translations, testing, ideas, artwork, user interface design, and of course programming. If you are interested in getting involved with OpenShot, please email jonathan@openshot.org directly.

What's the next big thing for OpenShot?

I am working on some really exciting improvements to frame by frame animation support in OpenShot. We already have some great animation features, but we still lack a strong user interface to support the work-flow of hand-drawn, frame by frame animation. That will be changing very soon, and I hope to establish OpenShot as a leader in that area!

The works "OpenShot Logo" and "OpenShot Maintainer picture" by Jonathan Thomas are used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Enjoy this interview? Check out our previous entry in this series, featuring AJ Jordon of gplenforced.org

Over the weekend of May 6th & 7th, the FSF invaded Bellingham, WA, for the annual Linuxfest ¹ Northwest conference. Several of our crew had talks accepted at the conference, which draws over 1500 attendees each year. FSF executive director John Sullivan gave a talk addressing claims that the GNU General Public License (GPL) is in decline (hint: there's no evidence this is true), Molly de Blanc (who has since joined our staff as a campaigns manager) gave a talk on ageism in free software, FSF board member Benjamin Mako Hill participated on a panel with the American Civil Liberties Union, and I talked about GPL compliance for devices and the Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification program. Sullivan also had the chance to be interviewed on Bryan Lunduke's show the "Lunduke Hour."

The weekend kicked off with a meetup on Friday night. We try to schedule social gatherings at all the events we attend to catch up with local FSF members and friends. It was a smaller group at this weekend's meetup, but it's still fun to catch up as well as meet new people. We actually had one attendee drive two hours just to come check out the gathering. They had only learned about free software recently and were excited to go to their first event. If you want to be notified when events like this are happening in your area, make sure to be signed up for the Free Software Supporter and share your location.

We also had a table in the expo hall, operated by a large group of wonderful volunteers. We don't always have the resources to have staff at all the free software conferences that happen all around the world, so we often rely on volunteers to help table at events. I may be a bit biased, but I think the Northwest crew of volunteers is simply one of the best, and I always enjoy catching up with them at events like this. Tabling may not seem like a terribly important thing, but it makes a huge difference for our mission. Many people become FSF associate members for the first time thanks to the efforts of volunteers at expo halls, and for some people, coming to a conference like this is their annual reminder to renew their membership. Even when their membership is up-to-date, many members decide to donate more after catching up with other activists at these events. Since the FSF gets the overwhelming majority of its budget from our membership program and individual donors, tabling at an event provides a substantial boost to the work we're able to do. Sales at the expo hall of merchandise from the GNU Press Shop also help a lot. Seeing a baby GNU in person can often tip the scales in favor of adoption. Our volunteers in Bellingham had great success, and lots of people were able to support the FSF as a result.

One of the great things about tabling beyond the fundraising is simply the chance to meet new people and make new friends. Given that my talk was on RYF, I was excited to meet and chat with several past and future applicants about the program. I also got to meet and hang out with several members of the FSF Compliance Lab Team. I work with those volunteers via IRC all year, so it was great to be able to catch up in person.

The talks we gave were all well-received, we raised a good amount of funds for the FSF, and had a great time catching up with old friends and making some new ones. If you want to join in on the fun at upcoming events, here's what you can do:

• Make sure you're signed up for our newsletter, the Free Software Supporter and provide your location so you can be notified about events and volunteer opportunities.

• Check out our calendar of upcoming events.

• Support our ability to speak at events like this by donating or becoming a member.

^1. Because this conference is such a great place to meet free software activists, it really is unfortunate that its name does not give due credit to the work of the hackers in the GNU Project — we hope that in the future they'll join SeaGL and become a GNU/Linux Fest.↩

With 313 million active users each month, lots of people, organizations, and bots communicate in 140 characters or less on Twitter. While the Free Software Foundation does use Twitter, the platform is saddled with ethical pitfalls like nonfree JavaScript and privacy threats. We encourage using decentralized microblogging options, like GNU social or pump.io.

Another program speaking the same protocol as GNU social made a huge splash this spring. It's called Mastodon, and its growing popularity was in part spurred by positive posts about it by Twitter users with large numbers of followers, like tech writer Sarah Jeong. That momentum is still strong.

Free software advocates can get excited about Mastodon because widespread adoption of federated, decentralized free software for social networking allows more people to break free of walled gardens like Twitter and Facebook and avoid using nonfree JavaScript without having to give up on connecting and conversing with friends on the Web. Federation lets people talk to each other from different sites, and decentralization lets many people do this without everyone depending on one giant server that is a single point of failure. You can even self-host a Mastodon (or GNU social) instance for your friends or anybody who chooses to join. All instances of a program like Mastodon use the same protocol -- so if I'm fsf@status.fsf.org and you're libregnuser@mastodon.fr, we can follow each other's accounts and communicate, even though our accounts aren't registered to the same domain. You can't do that with Twitter.

Decentralization and federation are on the FSF's High Priority Projects list because a decentralized Web built on free software can be more secure, more respectful of your privacy, and community-built and shared. Centralized servers might seem like a good option at first, but they tend to eventually abuse their users' freedoms (if they don't right away). These platforms require the use of nonfree software, they don't distribute the software they use, and they are poor platforms for activist communication -- like the free software movement -- because single gatekeepers control and filter everything. For example, Twitter has adopted various rules that restrict Twitter clients and apps in order to prioritize the needs of advertisers over individual users. Twitter has also become notorious for abusive behavior by some of its users -- free software for social networking sometimes takes a more stringent stance toward community standards (Mastodon, for one), though more work does need to be done to address these problems for decentralized systems.

The Web's governing body, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is taking interest in this, as well. Its Social Web Working Group has spent the last three years working to "develop standards to make it easier to build and integrate social applications with the Open Web Platform." Earlier this month, a decentralized social networking protocol that has been developed by the Social Web Working Group, ActivityPub, advanced to W3C Candidate Recommendation status, meaning that its significant features are mostly set, and the protocol is open to feedback from those who would implement it. GNU MediaGoblin developer Christopher Webber is a member of the Working Group and has discussed ActivityPub on his blog. The FSF is hopeful that this will build on current momentum and enable more exciting developments in this area in the future.

Join the federation!

Want to encourage decentralized, federated social interaction on the Web? Start participating!

• Create your own account on a GNU social or Mastodon server. (Don't forget to follow the FSF!)

• Set up your own instance of GNU social or other social microblogging site. This may be challenging, but it's rewarding and helps move the world toward true decentralization.

Participate in supporting the Directory by adding new entries and updating existing ones. We will be 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.

While the Directory has been and continues to be a great resource to the world for over a decade now, it has the potential of being a resource of even greater value. But it needs your help!

Back on this week in 1999, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals stated that merely "space-shifting", transferring and encoding those files that already reside on a user's hard drive, to a digital audio player is OK. This placed digital audio players in a similar stead as the "time-shifting" video cassette recorder. This week the theme of the meeting commemorates this decision by looking at audio/video manipulation software.

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.

Every week free software activists from around the world come together in #fsf on irc.freenode.org to help improve the Free Software Directory. This recaps the work we accomplished at the Friday, June 9th, 2017 meeting.

This week we were again focusing on adding new entries to the Directory. We worked through another good chunk of unapproved packages. Some were ready to go, while others needed bugs filed with their package maintainers to sort out some licensing issues. We also found some licensing issues of our own in the Directory, as some free software licenses are not properly displaying in our form. While it's possible to edit entries directly, we use a form to keep everything formatted properly, and to highlight what information is needed for a useful entry. So making sure that all our free software licenses are an option in the form will make it easier to add packages that may be using those licenses.

We also worked on getting ready for the import project, taking a look at previously imported entries and filing bugs when needed. So far its only been some formatting issues, but it's good to get even simple bugs filed.

If you would like to help update the Directory, meet with us every Friday in #fsf on irc.freenode.org from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. EDT (16:00 to 19:00 UTC).