International Women’s Day is coming up this Sunday, March 8, and it’s the perfect opportunity to highlight the accomplishments of some of the amazing women in free software we’ll be featuring at the LibrePlanet 2020 conference, coming up next weekend (March 14-15). As you’ll see, many women are doing exciting and important work that ties into our "Free the Future" theme, demonstrating how free software has the potential to unlock a better future for us all, and building projects that will help us get there.

If you haven’t registered for the conference yet, we encourage you to register today. Registration is possible online until March 10, 10:00 a.m Eastern Daylight Time (EDT). Walk-in registration is also normally possible, but we can't guarantee it. Plus, registering in advance helps us anticipate how many people to expect! And remember: if you are a student or a Free Software Foundation (FSF) associate member, you can attend the conference gratis.

With that said: as we recently announced, we’re proud to be welcoming Public Lab co-founder Shannon Dosemagen as one of our keynote speakers. Protecting the planet -- whatever that might mean to you -- is of increasing concern in the year 2020, so Shannon was a perfect fit for this year’s lineup: we know that the philosophy of the four freedoms has something special and crucial to offer every social movement. Her work demonstrates how both scientists and ordinary people can apply ethics inspired by the free software philosophy. As an environmental health advocate and community science champion, Shannon has a lot to say about how "freeing the future" will help to ensure that we have a future at all.

Another extraordinary activist will be kicking off the conference on Saturday morning as part of our initial keynote panel, featuring talented young free software developers: Alyssa Rosenzweig, a college student who interned at the FSF in 2018. She is currently studying Applied Mathematics at the University of Toronto, while also working at Collabora and leading the Panfrost project to build a free graphics stack for Mali GPUs. As you can see from her internship wrap-up post, her commitment and contributions to the free software movement are vast already, and we can’t wait to hear what insights she’ll be offering at the conference.

Another activist who has long kept her eyes trained on the future is Micky Metts, a worker/owner of Agaric (agaric.coop) and last year’s closing keynote speaker. Micky is a veteran of the free software movement and a perennial LibrePlanet speaker. Her work concentrates on the intersection of free software, platform cooperativism, technology networks, design justice, and cooperative development. Her talk, "Platform cooperativism, surveillance capitalism, predictive analysis, and you," will concentrate on how this work is our best hope to protect our data from surveillance and the increasingly Orwellian future she addressed in last year’s keynote.

Lucy Ingham is a comparative newcomer to the world of free software, but as a technology journalist zeroing in on how technology shapes the world we live in, she has spent a lot of time warning the world about the dangers of what she describes as the "Life as a Service (LaaS)" model. The abstract she submitted for her talk, "Rented future: The dangerous rise of life as a service" shares many themes with Cory Doctorow’s novella "Unauthorized Bread,", connecting that ominous near-future to the unsettling realities of the present.

These are only a few of the women who will be bringing their insights and their work to LibrePlanet 2020, and we hope you’ll join us to see them all, here in Boston next week!

LibrePlanet has an important role in building ties and collaboration in the free software movement, and we know how much many people look forward to it each year. The onset of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is a stressful and devastating development. We are considering all possible measures that might need to be taken as we carefully track the latest news updates. We are committed to the safety of our attendees, staff, and their wider communities, so we are approaching these decisions carefully.

At this time, the risk for Massachusetts residents remains low, and there are no travel notifications for the United States or Boston, MA. The latest update from the World Health Organization (WHO) from February 29 continues to advise against the application of any international travel restrictions, based on current information available. For the time being, we are remaining optimistic that LibrePlanet 2020 can continue as planned.

We will continue to monitor public health notifications, using information provided by the City of Boston, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the WHO, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which is charged with monitoring and responding to the coronavirus in the US. We are coordinating with the venue to increase the disinfecting of surfaces and to have sanitizer on site. Please be assured that we care about your safety just as much as your freedom, and are taking every precaution to ensure that the event is as inspiring and successful as ever.

If you have traveled to an area known to be at risk to COVID-19 in the month leading up to LibrePlanet 2020, please ensure that you have shown no flu-like symptoms in the last 14 days since your travel to that region. If you decide to cancel your registration for any reason related to this situation, please let us know at campaigns@fsf.org, so we are fully aware of how many people are being affected. If your registration was paid, we will refund it. The event will be streamed live, so you will not have to miss out on the entire experience.

Should the situation worsen, forcing a cancellation of the in-person event, an announcement will follow on fsf.org and libreplanet.org/2020. All registered conference participants will receive an update via email. We are also preparing contingency plans to be able to offer at least some talks via remote streaming.

Please keep yourself informed, and remember to protect your own health and others' by following basic best practices. Again, we are taking every step that we can to make LibrePlanet 2020 a safe experience for all of its attendees.

Thank you for your continued support and understanding.

• binutils-2.34
• bison-3.5.2
• datamash-1.6
• ed-1.16
• gdb-9.1
• glibc-2.31
• gnuhealth-3.6.3
• guile-debbugs-0.0.3
• gwl-0.2.0
• hyperbole-7.1.0
• jacal-1c6
• libmicrohttpd-0.9.70
• libtasn1-4.16.0
• nano-4.8
• ncurses-6.2
• octave-5.2.0
• parallel-20200222
• scm-5f3
• screen-4.8.0
• shepherd-0.7.0
• slib-3b6
• wb-2b4

For announcements of most new GNU releases, subscribe to the info-gnu mailing list: https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu.

To download: nearly all GNU software is available from https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/, or preferably one of its mirrors from https://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html. You can use the URL https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.

This month, we welcome Sanjay Bhatnagar as maintainer of the new package fussy.

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

If you have a working or partly working program that you'd like to offer to the GNU project as a GNU package, see https://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html.

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

As we said in an end-of-year post highlighting our work supporting free software development and infrastructure, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is planning to launch a public code hosting and collaboration platform ("forge"), to launch in 2020. Members of the FSF tech team are currently reviewing ethical Web-based software that helps teams work on their projects, with features like merge requests, bug tracking, and other common tools.

The new site will complement the current GNU and non-GNU Savannah servers, which we will continue to support and improve, in collaboration with their awesome volunteer team. (By the way, if you want to volunteer, please email savannah-hackers-public@gnu.org with a note about your interest!)

Infrastructure is very important for free software, and it's unfortunate that so much free software development currently relies on sites that don't publish their source code, and require or encourage the use of proprietary software. Our GNU ethical repository criteria aim to set a high standard for free software code hosting, and we hope to meet that with our new forge.

We plan on contributing improvements upstream for the new forge software we choose, to boost its score on those criteria. Our tech team is small for the size of the network we maintain, and we don't have any full-time developers who work for the FSF, so we are limited in the amount of time we can spend on the software we choose. We'll communicate with the upstream developers to request improvements and help clarify any questions related to the ethical repository criteria.

So far, we have been researching a list of candidate programs, and analyzing them in terms of ethical and practical criteria. Some of the software candidates we're looking at were found on the Free Software Directory. We aim to initially reach a B rating on the GNU ethical repository criteria, and then to work towards reaching an A rating after we launch. Reaching a B will require LibreJS support, no third party tracking, proper license information, and more. We also came up with a list of practical criteria, which includes two-factor authentication (2FA), high performance, being well supported upstream, and other common forge features.

We are filtering out systems that are targeted toward single organizations or companies, because we want users to be able to sign up and create their own repos on our site. If you're looking for a system to handle your organization's source code management needs, there are some fully free options out there for you, including Kallithea, Allura, and Phabricator.

We also hope that in the future we'll be able to see decentralized, federated collaboration platforms that meet most needs. We will continue to be interested in that direction, but we think the need for this freedom-respecting forge is time sensitive, so we're going to do it with the free software we have available right now. Allowing issues and other data to be imported and exported is a feature that we want in our new forge, because that will at least ensure that users can move to another instance of the same platform.

We are tracking our ongoing analysis on the LibrePlanet wiki, and will continue updating the page with information pertaining to our research about free software for our upcoming forge.

The project will operate with a high level of transparency: we will publish the source code that runs on the server and document how we run the system, and we welcome volunteers to help guide and improve the project. Reach out to us at the LibrePlanet developers mailing list if you're interested in participating.

Up next for the FSF tech team is to do more research about systems that have met our initial requirements, in order to find the best options available. Once we know what we're interested in, we'll start trying them out and performing more extensive tests.

Stay tuned to hear from us about the software stack we end up choosing, and for our site launch announcement!

On March 14th and 15th, 2020, the free software community will come together at the Back Bay Events Center to learn, exchange ideas, catch up with friends, and plan the future of the movement.

Register today! As always, Free Software Foundation (FSF) associate members and students attend gratis.

LibrePlanet 2020 is organized by the FSF. Hundreds of people from across the globe will converge to explore this year's theme, "Free the Future." We'll be delving into the threats to user freedom that we've all been reading about every day in the media, as well as the unique role the free software movement plays in solving these problems.

In addition to the first keynote we announced last month, Brewster Kahle, LibrePlanet 2020 will feature a panoply of presentations. Our lineup includes some talks we absolutely can't wait to see, and we think you'll feel the same way! You can now dive in to the speakers already confirmed and start planning your itinerary. Make sure to have a look at these highlights:

• Executive director of Free Geek Toronto Ryan Fukunaga will focus on the positives, challenges, and ongoing conversation around using free software to expand access to technology in his presentation "Free software and the digital divide."

• Last year's keynote speaker Micky Metts will return with Keegan Rankin and Chris Thompson in an engaging session on surveillance capitalism and how users can seize control over their own data in "Platform cooperativism, surveillance capitalism, predictive analysis, and you."

• Purism CEO Todd Weaver will present the latest news on his company's attempts to create a truly free cell phone in: "Freeing the mobile phone: The story of the Librem 5."

• DeeDee Lavinder will help us explore the world of encryption in "Keeping secrets: What you need to know about encryption."

• LibrePlanet newcomer Lucy Ingham will explore the continued domination of the Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS) model in "Rented future: The dangerous rise of life as a service."

• Due to popular demand, this year features two(!) lightning talk sessions, which you can sign up for via the LibrePlanet wiki.

LibrePlanet 2020 offers lots of opportunities for socializing, too! The annual FSF open house will take place on the evening of Friday, March 13th, at the FSF office. And the LibrePlanet Saturday night party will feature a sparkling new location. As we have in the past, we'll organize a dinner specifically for women, genderqueer, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming attendees, please mail campaigns@fsf.org if you're interested in joining. If you are looking to organize your own dinner or meetup, you can do so using the LibrePlanet wiki 2020 conference social and dinner pages as a central place for communication about this.

Pre-order a LibrePlanet 2020 T-shirt by February 26

You can pre-order a LibrePlanet 2020 commemorative T-shirt from the GNU Press shop. Make sure you order your shirt by February 26 to guarantee availability in your size.

We are planning a photo with people wearing LibrePlanet T-shirts this year. So if you have a vintage LibrePlanet T-shirt, sign up on the LibrePlanet wiki T-shirt page, bring it and we will take a snazzy group photo!

LibrePlanet needs volunteers -- maybe you!

LibrePlanet has grown in size and scope, and its continued success is thanks to dozens of volunteers who help prepare for and run the conference. Volunteering is a great way to meet fellow community members and contribute to LibrePlanet, even if you can't attend in person! If you are interested in volunteering for LibrePlanet 2020, email resources@fsf.org. We thank all of our on-site volunteers by offering them gratis conference admission, lunch, and a LibrePlanet T-shirt.

Seeking sponsors

LibrePlanet cannot exist without the support of the community. If you or your company would like to sponsor or exhibit at LibrePlanet, please email resources@fsf.org.

Your support will help sustain, energize, and inspire the free software community. Sponsoring provides you the unique opportunity to demonstrate your commitment to free software, and engage with hundreds of legal and policy experts, developers, students, activists, free software and technology enthusiasts, and potential employees with your organization.

Spread the word about LibrePlanet 2020: blog or microblog to let people know that you'll be there, using the hashtag #libreplanet.

We hope to see you in four weeks at LibrePlanet!