On October 4, 1985, Richard Stallman founded the non-profit Free Software Foundation to support the free software movement, especially the GNU Project (begun in 1983), the GNU General Public License (created in 1989), and the four freedoms that define free software:

• the freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• the freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1).
• the freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• the freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3).

At thirty years old, the FSF was the first non-profit organization dedicated to free software, and is one of the oldest digital rights organizations in the world. This anniversary is a good reason to celebrate, and free software enthusiasts joined the festivities from all over, attending the party in Boston, watching the livestream of toasts by Allison Randal, Eben Moglen, Vernor Vinge, Karen Sandler, Bradley Kuhn, and Cory Doctorow, followed by an inspiring speech by Richard Stallman, and hosting their own celebrations by plugging in to our party network. We even surprised partygoers with a performance of "The Free Software Song" and the Bulgarian song from which it takes its melody, "Sadi moma bela loza," sung by members of the Boston-area Bulgarian groups Divi Zheni and Zornitsa.

   

The FSF also hosted a User Freedom Summit in Cambridge, with more than 80 attendees, who took part in a copyleft.org hackfest, an introduction to the decentralized Web, a discussion of the free software BIOS/UEFI replacement Libreboot, an intro to GnuPG email encryption, and Eben Moglen's look at the next fifteen years of the free software movement.

Our friends and supporters celebrated elsewhere, too. The Free Software Foundation Europe had a party in Berlin, with this beautiful cake, inspired by our 30th anniversary logo:

CC-BY-SA Matthias Kirschner

Alagoas:

CC-BY-SA Daniel Pimentel

and a ton in other locations.

If you organized an event to celebrate the FSF's thirtieth anniversary, tell us about it! Send your photos or blog posts to campaigns@fsf.org -- we'd like to share them!

So, what does the FSF have planned for the next thirty years? Plenty. We're going to continue to fight for user freedom, alerting the public to the dangers of nonfree software in tiny computers everywhere, enforcing the GPL, and encouraging more people to use free software every day. We just upgraded our CiviCRM instance, which makes staying in touch with you even easier, and we've got more technology upgrades planned, to make our work more efficient. We have added new staff positions in the past two years, and we'd like a few more -- a bigger team will help us expand our reach, share urgent information with you faster, and deepen our relationships in the free software community.

But to do that, we need you. We have over 3,400 members, and more than two-thirds of our funding comes from individuals -- members and one-time or occasional donors of sums large and small. We rely on the free software community's generosity, and there are many ways to give. The third edition of Richard Stallman's essay collection, Free Software, Free Society, is now available in hardcover and paperback. And we still have commemorative FSF30 t-shirts, as well! Members enjoy a 20% discount on all purchases in the GNU Press shop.

Thanks for celebrating with us. In the coming weeks, keep an eye out for recordings from the User Freedom Summity and party, more on LibrePlanet 2016 (you can submit a session proposal through November 16), a community survey that will help us shape the next thirty years of the FSF, and guidelines for repositories that host free software projects, authored by Richard Stallman.

You've got until Monday, November 16th, 2015 at 10:00 in the morning EST (15:00 UTC) to submit your proposals. We can't wait to see what you come up with!

Every year, LibrePlanet brings together developers, policy experts, activists, hackers and end users. It's a place to learn new skills, share accomplishments and face challenges to computer user freedom together as a community. If you're new to the community, check out last year's conference site and session videos for a taste of what's to come.

What kind of sessions are we looking for?

LibrePlanet is defined by its combination of technical talks with non-technical sessions on free software activism, culture and current events. We are especially interested to see proposals from people who use free software or apply its values for social benefit, from academic research to community organizing, education to medicine and the arts.

We're committed to increasing the participation of speakers belonging to groups traditionally underrepresented at free software conferences, including women and people of color. If you're comfortable sharing demographic information, there is an area for it on the proposal form, but your proposal will not be judged negatively if you leave those fields blank.

It's important to us to provide sessions that are friendly to newcomers, as well as those that help experienced hackers push their technical skills. Whatever your experience level or the experience level of your audience, we want to include your session! (As a corollary of this, we welcome sessions for kids or teens.)

What makes LibrePlanet so special is the amazing contributions from our speakers, exhibitors, and volunteers. We can't wait to hear your ideas. Submit a proposal now!

Nominations are still open for the Free Software Awards

If you know a free software contributor or project that deserves celebration, don't hesitate to nominate them! This is your opportunity to publicly recognize people and projects that have inspired you. Your nominations will be reviewed by our awards committee and the winners will be announced at LibrePlanet 2016.

Learn more about the free software awards and submit a nomination.

That's all for now. See you in March!

If you'd like to sponsor LibrePlanet, please email us at campaigns@fsf.org.

We conducted an email-based interview with Noah Swartz of Privacy Badger. Privacy Badger is a browser add-on that detects and blocks third party tracking. If Privacy Badger notices a third party site that it thinks is attempting to track your browsing around the web it blocks it and prevents it from writing or reading cookies and other identifying information about your browser. Additionally Privacy Badger works with EFF's newly drafted Do Not Track policy which aims to make user opt-out of online tracking a reality.

Noah Swartz is a Staff Technologist at EFF and works on Privacy Badger.

What inspired the creation of Privacy Badger?

Online tracking has become a pervasive and invisible reality of Web browsing. Users get a sense that it's happening when they're shown targeted ads, but that is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how the data collected about them is being used.

Why is a browser plug-in like Privacy Badger so necessary?

Advertisers and other online trackers have proposed to regulate themselves by allowing users to 'opt-out' of target ads. Unfortunately this 'opt-out' does nothing to stop the collection of user data. We felt that there had to be a stronger way for users to protect their browsing data, and a lever by which to push trackers into a place of respect for user privacy.

What features do you think really sets Privacy Badger apart from other privacy protecting software?

Privacy Badger doesn't use an explicit blacklist to decide what and what not to block. Instead it builds up its own list of what to block based on what looks like it's tracking you as you browse. This means that not only can advertisers not try to cajole EFF into making their domains exempt from being blocked by privacy badger, it also means that Privacy Badger will catch trackers that haven't been identified by other ad blocker's blacklists. Additionally Privacy Badger works in tandem with EFFs new Do Not Track policy, which we hope to see online tracers adopt as a way to respect user opt out.

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

Technical users are encouraged to contribute code. The repositories for the Firefox and Chrome versions are on github (https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadgerfirefox & https://github.com/EFForg/privacybadgerchrome) and have many open bugs and feature requests that we'd love help with. Non-technical users are encouraged to use Privacy Badger and let us know about any issues they have. This includes things like visual nitpicks, broken sites, or platform specific bugs. Also we're working to translate Privacy Badger into many different languages, we'd welcome anyone able to help with that.

What's the next big thing for Privacy Badger?

We're looking into how to spot more types of tracking. Currently Privacy Badger checks for text cookies, HTML5 local storage cookies, and canvas finger printing. But there are many other ways in which your browser can be identified, we'd like to prevent those as well. Additionally there are other browsers we don't support, as well as no mobile browsers supported. Since the way people interact with the Web is becoming more through mobile platforms we think it's an important next step.

For more tools and resources on protecting your privacy, please check out our campaign against surveillance

Enjoy this interview? Check out our Licensing and Compliance Lab's interview series. In our last interview, we featured Joël Krähemann, maintainer of Advanced GTK+ Sequencer

We have written previously about the organizations and individuals who opposed exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's (DMCA) anti-circumvention provisions. These drones oppose the rights of users to backup, modify, and study the software and devices that we own. The DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions create legal penalties for simply accessing your software under your own terms, and raises those penalties even higher should you dare to share the tools needed to do so. It creates real penalties for anyone who wants to avoid Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) controls. The granting of exemptions to these totalitarian rules is a broken and half-hearted attempt to limit the damage these rules bring, granting for 3 years a reprieve for certain specified devices and software.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) side-stepped this process and sent a letter separately directly to the Copyright Office. In the letter they argued that users should not be able to access and modify the software on their own vehicles. In their estimation, this would enable users to violate emissions controls. So it would be better for them if the hammer of the DMCA remained hanging over the head of every user or researcher who wanted to access the software on their vehicle.

Of course, just a few months after telling the Copyright Office that users couldn't be trusted with access to their devices, the EPA revealed a major scandal involving Volkswagen. It turns out that Volkswagen had for many years cheated the emissions test performed by the EPA. Volkswagen had surreptitiously included some code in their diesel vehicles that would detect the EPA's tests and have the car change its performance in order to meet EPA mandates. Once the test was over, the code would revert the vehicle to its normal, high-polluting functioning. This scam apparently went on for years before it was detected by researchers.

Of course the irony is that if users and researchers had the right to access the software on their cars, they might have discovered this fraud years ago. As Eben Moglen, founder of the Software Freedom Law Center noted "If Volkswagen knew that every customer who buys a vehicle would have a right to read the source code of all the software in the vehicle, they would never even consider the cheat, because the certainty of getting caught would terrify them.” Volkswagen is already a contributor on the kernel Linux, and as Bradley M. Kuhn, President and Distinguished Technologist of the Software Freedom Conservancy pointed out it is likely that Volkswagen vehicles already contain some free software. But some is not all, and clearly they kept much of their software secret in order to hide their scam. If all the software on the vehicles was free software they never could have perpetrated this scheme.

Researchers also could have discovered the fraud had they not been hindered by the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions, as Kit Walsh of the Electronic Frontier Foundation argued. The EPA of course failed to understand all this when drafting their letter promoting the use of DRM.

But there is a more galling fact at play here. What the EPA argued in their letter was that the exemption should not be granted under the DMCA as a means for enforcing efficiency standards. That clearly isn't the stated purpose of the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions, and highlights one of the fundamental problems with DRM. That a government agency would try to commandeer the DRM of private actors, not to enforce copyright but as a means to enforce something wholly unrelated, demonstrates a central truth: DRM is not about copyright; it's about control. It's about dominating users. It's about spying on them. It's about installing rootkits onto their computers. It has nothing to do with rights, and everything to do with restriction.

We can't let governments and corporation use DRM to take over our lives. This is what you can do today to fight back:

If you microblog, please share the following message (or your own) with the hashtag #DRMshame. We strongly suggest that if you use Twitter to publicly call the EPA and Volkswagen out, you do it in a way that avoids using proprietary software:

• @EPA You should be ashamed of yourself for trying to use Digital Restrictions Management #DRMshame https://u.fsf.org/fraud
• @VW All software on your vehicles needs to be free software without DRM to restore our trust #DRMshame https://u.fsf.org/fraud

Here's what else you can do.:

• Join the Defective By Design mailing list to keep up to date on the on-going fight against DRM.
• Sign up for the FSF's monthly newsletter the Free Software Supporter to keep up to date on all the latest news in free software.
• To help fund our work, consider donating to the FSF.

We recently updated our list of various licenses and comments about them to include the Universal Permissive License (UPL). The UPL is a lax, non-copyleft license that is compatible with the GNU GPL. The UPL contains provisions dealing explicitly with the grant of patent licenses, whereas many other simple lax licenses only have an implicit grant. While making the grant perfectly clear is a reasonable goal, we still recommend using Apache 2.0 for simple programs that don't require copyleft. For more extensive programs, a copyleft license like the GNU GPL should be used to ensure that all users can enjoy software freedom.

• To keep up to date on newly added licenses, as well as current topics and activities in free software, please sign up for our monthly newsletter The Free Software Supporter
• Help support the Compliance Lab's work in reviewing licenses and more by donating to the Free Software Foundation
• Join us in celebrating the 30th anniversary of the FSF