With recent improvements to the Free Software Directory server software, editing is now easier than ever!

Join the FSF and friends on Friday, April 5th, from 2:00pm 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!

29 new GNU releases this month (as of March 24, 2013):

• acct-6.6.1
• gnuchess-6.0.3
• mpfr-3.1.2
• cppi-1.18
• gnuedma-0.18.6
• nano-2.3.2
• dejagnu-1.5.1
• gnuhealth-1.8.1
• texinfo-5.1
• emacs-24.3
• gv-3.7.4
• thales-1.1.1
• freeipmi-1.2.5
• libgcrypt-1.5.1
• tramp-2.2.7
• gcc-4.8.0
• librejs-4.9.3
• trueprint-5.4
• gecb-0.8.4
• marst-2.7
• vc-dwim-1.7
• gettext-0.18.2.1
• maverik-6.5
• wdiff-1.2.1
• gidfwizard-0.6.4
• mcsim-5.5.0
• xorriso-1.2.8
• global-6.2.8
• moe-1.5

To get announcements of most new GNU releases, subscribe to the info-gnu mailing list: http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu. Nearly all GNU software is available from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/, or preferably one of its mirrors (http://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html). You can use the url http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.

This month, we welcome Cynthia Rempel as the new maintainer of the pgccfd document and Jeffrin Jose as the new maintainer of GNU dap (in addition to already maintaining GNU trueprint, with a new release this month).

A number of GNU packages, as well as the GNU operating system as a whole, are looking for maintainers and other assistance. Please see http://www.gnu.org/server/takeaction.html#unmaint if you'd like to help. The general page on how to help GNU is at http://www.gnu.org/help/help.html. To submit new packages to the GNU operating system, see http://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html.

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

The shirts are pearl gray, featuring the blue-and-black LibrePlanet 2013: Commit Change logo. It comes in unisex and women's sizes.

This past weekend, many of you joined us for the annual LibrePlanet 2013 conference. For those of you unable to get a conference shirt or wanting a second, GNU Press now has the remaining inventory up for sale! The shirts are pearl gray, featuring the blue-and-black LibrePlanet 2013: Commit Change logo. It comes in unisex and women's sizes.

If you can't find something in the store but think we should offer it, please add your suggestion to our Ideas page. And remember, associate members of the Free Software Foundation get a 20% discount on all purchases made through the GNU Press store, so if you are not a member already, join today!

To keep up with announcements about new products available in the GNU Press store, subscribe to the mailing list.

Yesterday was the first day of LibrePlanet 2013. Here are some stats:

• 16 talks, workshops, plenaries, sprints and install parties
• 4 conference halls and classrooms
• 19 dedicated and effective volunteers
• 4 tables of tasty breakfast food and snacks
• ~200 happy people excited about free software!

On to day two!

The latest installment of our Licensing and Compliance Lab's series on free software developers who choose GNU licenses for their works.

In this edition, we interviewed Adam Hyde via email. Adam is a knowledge production consultant. He is the founder of Booktype -- a book production platform released under AGPLv3, as well as Book Sprints, and FLOSS Manuals. Adam lives between Whangarei Heads, New Zealand, Berlin, and the road.

What is Booktype?

It is an online book production platform. It is suited to single author and collaborative production. It is designed with a low threshold for entry and is a bona fide end-to-end solution, taking care of book creation through export to book formats like EPUB, book formatted PDF, etc.

What inspired you to create Booktype?

We needed it for FLOSS Manuals (FM). With FM we had a growing community and we needed an online book production system to manage collaborative production. So we built one first on top of TWiki and then as a standalone application in Django.

How far along with the project are you?

It works and is available and quite sophisticated. It's at 1.5 but 2.0 isnt that far away. There will always be improvements but it's pretty good as is.

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

It is easy to use and it uses 100% free software. We have, for example, held out against pressure to use proprietary PDF renderers (namely PrinceXML) which other "open source" softwares use. We instead ended up building our own which is better than any alternatives whether free or proprietary -- it's called BookJS and can run independent of Booktype.

Why did you choose the GNU Affero GPL version 3 as Booktype's license?

Because we wished the code to remain free. It's that simple.

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

They can write to me directly and we can work out how to get them started.

What's the next big thing for Booktype?

A move to content-editable editors instead of What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get. That really changes the game.

Please see the Booktype entry in the Free Software Directory for more information.

Enjoyed this interview? Check out our previous entry in this series featuring Matthieu Aubry of Piwik.