Join the FSF and friends on Friday, June 19th, from 2pm to 5pm EDT (19:00 to 22:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory 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 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 Free Software Directory 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!

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!

We recently updated our list of various licenses and comments about them to include the Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer(HPND). The HPND is a simple permissive license, compatible with all versions of the GPL. The HPND is actually more of a template, allowing developers to select a few options, such as whether to include a disclaimer. Variations on this license had actually been approved previously (such as the old license of Python), but it never had its own entry in the list. While at this point HPND is largely deprecated in favor of more modern lax licenses, you can still find it on some current projects, and kicking around inside some long-running projects that include code created back when it was more prevalent. As such, we wanted to include it on the list explicitly, to help clear up any confusion regarding whether this simple license was free software.

Since then, Email Self-Defense has been translated into ten languages, and our metrics show that tens of thousands of people have used it.

If you've been putting off setting up encryption, or know someone who might like your help setting it up, this anniversary is a great occasion to do it! It only takes about half an hour with the Email Self-Defense guide.

Even if you have nothing to hide, using encryption helps protect the privacy of people you communicate with and makes it harder for surveillance systems to isolate messages sent by those that do need protection, like whistleblowers and activists. By encrypting more of the traffic on the net, we give the surveillance systems more opaque information to sift through.

But the goal of Email Self-Defense is more than just helping people protect their information. It's also about highlighting the crucial role of free software in privacy and security, which has not received the attention it deserves in the media coverage of surveillance reform. No matter what laws governments are eventually able to pass to regulate surveillance programs, access to the source code of the computer systems we are using is crucial if we are to have a fighting chance of understanding and controlling what happens to our data.

Encryption is a critical first step, but to effectively resist bulk surveillance, we also need to build new, decentralized Web systems and work for political change. The FSF most recently joined a coalition to resist efforts to require mandatory backdoors in encryption software and we maintain a surveillance action area on fsf.org. Our founder, Richard Stallman, also describes guidelines for reining in surveillance in some detail on gnu.org.

We're excited to have an intern, Adam Leibson, joining us for the summer to work on encryption- and surveillance-related campaigns. Stay tuned for publications about his work. In the meantime, have fun setting up encryption with Email Self-Defense and share the infographic with your friends. If you want to try out your encryption, you can always send me a message at zak@fsf.org with the public key 6EB2 B137 347E 6F7C DEDC AFF6 82DE 8D64 B509 0AC8.

This introduction has taken me time because we have been busy—despite the record snowfall in Boston this winter, there have been a few 'fires' to put out. Once the fires were extinguished we had more snow than I could ever imagine, followed quickly by LibrePlanet, so perhaps this should be taken as my six-month introduction.

Why would people in the Latin American free software community know me? Well, before moving back to Boston, I spent nearly three years south of the U.S., living in San Marcos, Guatemala and Distrito Federal (aka Mexico City), Mexico. In that time, I traveled to Brazil for the World Social Forum Free Palestine as a free software tech activist working to maintain the conference site (Drupal 7) and registration (CiviCRM), and to participate in a collective session on tech security for activists. However, tech has not always been my path. I became an activist before deeply delving into the free software movement.

My work began with political organizing for the Howard Dean campaign in the U.S. in 2003. During that time, I learned and organized using the labor union organizing model of César Chávez of the United Farm Workers. Why might that be of interest to the free software movement? The database system we used to track, update, and engage voters is mirrored in CiviCRM. The methods and models of our organizing focused on sharing stories and getting to know our supporters more closely. We kept detailed notes from our one-on-one meetings with supporters and input that information into our database with ease, but more importantly, we were able to track friends, family, and neighbors who expressed support. We could pinpoint the meetings they attended; all of this was easily put into the database in a form that, if another organizer picked up our work, they could catch up pretty quickly and continue without missing a beat. Impressed? I know I was, to the point that I felt the desire and need to learn more about this organizing model, with the hopes the tech would not be too far behind.

Soon after the election was over and George W. Bush was reelected, I found my way into a graduate program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The graduate program in Labor Relations and Research (we just called it Labor Studies) altered my life and understanding of the world, including free software. Though I had used GNU/Linux before, it was in graduate school that I began to see the connection between free software movements and labor/social movements. I saw that we cannot just sit on the sidelines waiting for people to individually choose to use and build free software, we need to organize and engage people to understand why free software creates a better future for us all. The first step came with my fellow union members (graduate students in the UMass system are organized in the United Auto Workers union) where we began to replace the Windows systems in our office with Ubuntu (which was only a step away from proprietary, as I later learned how Ubuntu is not so free as in freedom, despite being free as in beer). Though it was a good step with our local, in other labor union interactions the idea of GNU/Linux was foreign, as the tide of MacBooks swept in (I was guilty of it too, but that did not last long).

In labor circles discussing technology is a challenge. The labor movement itself never adapted well to technology, usually fighting it off instead of learning how it could improve their bargaining position and offer their own technology ideas before the 'boss' enforced them. Discussions about office computers were equally challenging, as computers are seen as just a tool. Seeing this, I began actively conversing with free software folks on identi.ca (later StatusNet and now GNU social), where I met a comrade named Walton (aka @leischa), who wrote his masters dissertation on adapting the free software development method (making code available for others to look at and contribute to) to labor movements, which historically has been rather closed and don't share experiences with other unions and groups. So, we both share the viewpoint that labor unions need to work together not just in solidarity, but in reality. There are strengths in some unions and weaknesses in others, and we both advocate for unions to accept those differences and move forward, adapting to the system we reside in -- that is when we decided to create a podcast to discuss this issue.

With our shared vision, me and Walton created the Cyberunions podcast. We began before—but in the same year as—the Occupy movement. We discussed in great detail software that we knew would be beneficial to the labor movement, as well as elements in the labor movement that free software communities could adopt. Walton and I had and continue to have visions of labor unions funding free software, but we also felt it was a struggle to convince a union to use free software, let alone support its development. The podcast has been around for a while now, though we have been bad about keeping it up to date as of late—but there are plans to bring it back.

In the four years that the Cyberunions podcast has been around, I have had the chance to meet and learn from many amazing folks, mostly from the May First People Link community, but also with folks from StatusNet/GNU social—and that continues to this day. If it were not for chance meetings and connections, I would never be where I am now, working for an organization at the foundation and forefront of free software. It was activism and organizing that got me where I am, and I see no reason to stop now. I will continue to organize and work with unions to adopt free software even our own (FSF staff are also in the UAW -- more like United Aferro Workers). If you see me around in IRC (marxistvegan on freenode or mv on oftc and indymedia) or on GNU social, I look forward to engaging with the community and plan to keep organizing while maintaining our servers through rain, sleet, hail, and snow. I only draw the line when the temperature are in the 90s (30s in C). I hate the heat.

in solidarity && happy hacking

Here are some photographic excerpts of a few of the trips RMS has taken in the past few months.

He was in Quezón City, Philippines, on March 25th, 2015, to give his speech, "A Brave GNU World," to a packed room as part of RightsCon Southeast Asia:

(Photo under CC BY-ND and courtesy of EngageMedia.)

...in Iligan, Philippines, on March 30th, to give a speech on computing, freedom, and privacy at Mindanao State University:

(Photos under CC BY-ND and courtesy of Bobby Timonera.)

...in Myanmar — his first visit to the country — to speak in Yangon on April 2nd and in Mandalay on April 7th. The visit was a great success, with The Myanmar Times' Stuart Alan Becker saying

Richard Stallman's speeches in Yangon and at Mandalay University caused a lot of young people in Myanmar to take a second look at the trends taking place in the online world. In a country where the migration to mobile technology is happening at great speed, Stallman's message was something most of them had never heard: an activism in favor of user's control. The people who listened to Richard were exposed — some for the first time — to the notion that profit motivated companies impose restrictions and limit choices. With FSF's resources, I think some of them were opened to a new world of possibility.

(Photos under CC BY-ND and courtesy of Stuart Alan Becker.)

...and in Lyon, France, on May 14th, to speak at the European Lab's fifth forum for an audience of hundreds:

(Photos under CC BY-ND and courtesy of Marion Bornaz.)

Please fill out our contact form so that we can inform you about future events in and around Quezón City, Iligan, Yangon and Mandalay, and Lyon.

Please see www.fsf.org/events for a full list of RMS's confirmed engagements, and contact rms-assist@gnu.org if you'd like him to come speak.

Thank you to everyone who helped make these visits possible!