Mise à jour de la base de données, veuillez patienter...

As software permeates more and more aspects of society, the FSF must expand our work to protect and extend computer user freedom. We launched our yearly fundraiser with the goal of welcoming 500 new members and raising $450,000 before December 31st. Please support the work at the root of the free software movement: make a donation or – better yet – join us and become a member today.

For the past year, we have been very busy upgrading our server infrastructure, which we wrote about in the Fall FSF Bulletin. The new stack of machines works fully on free software all the way down through the BIOS, and makes use of redundant network attached storage over 10Gbps Ethernet. Cool stuff! We take care to prevent issues with freedom and privacy on our machines, which means avoiding the current x86 server CPUs that are encumbered with back doors as well as other components that require the user to load nonfree firmware. We use a high-end ASUS KGPE D-16 server motherboard, supported by Libreboot. Despite being a few years old – and thus supporting CPUs without known back doors – it is a beefy piece of gear, running up to 32 CPU cores, 256GB of RAM, and many terabytes of Solid State Disk storage.

Making the extra effort to build a uniquely free server stack does not come without some hiccups. Although the motherboards work fine on their own – we are already using them to run lists.gnu.org and Savannah services – they do have rough edges that need to be polished, for example, to get reliable Peripheral Component Interconnect support. The setup of the new stack and migration of our services will require a sustained effort from our three-person tech team during 2017, which cannot happen successfully without your support.

By hosting most of the GNU Project, we enable development on free software components that are key for the whole computer industry, such as Emacs, Bash, and the utilities at the base of all the GNU/Linux distributions powering supercomputers and the Internet's servers. Our public FTP server, ftp.gnu.org, serves 100Mb per second of free software all day, every day. That is more than a terabyte! On top of that, lists.gnu.org and lists.nongnu.org spool out about a half million emails between free software developers and users each day!

We are excited to have the opportunity to benefit the community by building, testing, and perfecting new hardware and technology that doesn't just work, but also supports our freedoms. Our ability to provide dependable servers for the FSF and GNU Project comes from your generosity and commitment. Your support funds hardware and the time of free software experts to work on deployments. We need you to give back and support this root infrastructure, enabling future free software development and distribution to thrive.

P.S.: If you have not already submitted, the LibrePlanet Call For Papers is closing tomorrow, November 30th, 10:00 EST (15:00 UTC)!

A big part of our work in the compliance lab revolves around license compliance. We handle compliance for many GNU Project packages, like GCC and GNU EMACS. When someone fails to meet the conditions of the GNU General Public License we help them to understand what is needed to be a good citizen in the free software community. But the nature of that work generally means that it all happens behind the scenes. We're not in the business of shaming those who need help with compliance, so when a compliance case arises there may never be any public statement about the situation. That can leave people wondering about the inner workings of the compliance lab. And whether that's borne out of pure curiosity or wanting to understand the system when going about their own compliance efforts, we want to share as much of that process as we can.

Thus, ten years ago we published an article License Violations and Compliance that helps to paint a picture of the work we do in the compliance lab. Beginning with an explanation of our philosophy when it comes to compliance (which has since been codified into The Principles of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement ), the article goes on to explain the life of a compliance case. From the report of a potential violation, to confirming that a violation does exist, to the process of educating the violator about best practices, this article gives an inside look into how compliance work is actually done.

On the tenth anniversary of the publication of that article, it's remarkable how that process has remained in place. Of course, the FSF had been handling compliance work for decades at the time it was written. And while the software and devices involved in such cases has truly changed over the years, the basic principles for correcting an errors have remained unchanged.

We hope you'll enjoy looking back and learning more about how we have handled compliance issues for so long. Resources like "License Violations and Compliance" are made possible thanks to the users who support our work, here's what you can do to help

• You can keep up to date on this series and more free software news by subscribing to our newsletter, the Free Software Supporter and subscribing to our RSS feed.
• You can help fund our work in creating these licensing resources by becoming a member or by making a donation.

Enjoy this article? Check out our previous entry on Licensing resource series: How to choose a license for your own work

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 on the Friday, November 25th, 2016 meeting.

Last week's theme was friends and family, where we asked our regular volunteers to invite new volunteers to participate in the weekly meeting. mangeurdenuage had some great success posting in the Trisquel forums and some other spaces and attracted two new volunteers. They then trained the new recruits and helped them to add their first entries. While we didn't get as many new volunteers as we might have hoped, we put together some ideas for attracting more volunteers going forward.

And while the theme was about new friends and family joining us, there was still a lot of work from previous meetings that needed more attention. David_Hedlund has taken the lead in working through new requirements and categories for free software in the directory. For any free software package, a user always has the ability to modify the work to meet their needs. But for someone newly introduced to a package by the directory, there can be some other pertinent information they would like to know before diving in and downloading the software. The work we're doing on the categories should eventually make it easy for volunteers to tag certain issues with packages, and have some template text displayed on the entry. This feeds off the work we did in tagging some works as historical, but addresses a wider range of issues. While the work is not complete, a lot of progress was made at the meeting and we hope to have this feature fully implemented in the near future.

If you would like to help update the directory, meet with us every Friday in #fsf on irc.freenode.org from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. EST (18:00 to 20:00 UTC).

Participate in supporting the FSD by adding new entries and updating existing ones. We will be on IRC in the #fsf channel on freenode.

Tens of thousands of people visit directory.fsf.org each month to discover free software. Each entry in the FSD 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 FSD has been and continues to be a great resource to the world over the past decade, it has the potential of being a resource of even greater value. But it needs your help!

This week's theme is friends and family. We have a great team of regulars showing up to help improve the directory each week, but as the saying goes, the more the merrier. So this week we're hoping that you invite your friends and family to join in on the fun. We'll be focusing on training new volunteers on how to update and improve the directory. We'll be continuing work on other projects from previous weeks as well.

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 FSD Meetings pages that everyone is welcome to contribute to before, during, and after each meeting.