Free software activists, as well as many scientists and medical professionals, have long since realized that proprietary medical software and devices are neither ethical nor adequate to our needs. The COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated some of these shortcomings to a broader audience -- and also given our community a unique opportunity to offer real, material help at a difficult time. We're putting together a plan to pitch in, and we hope you'll join us: keep reading to find out what you can do!

You may already be aware that software and hardware restrictions are actively hampering the ability of hospitals to repair desperately needed ventilators all over the world, and how some Italian volunteers ran into problems when they 3D printed ventilator valves. (As you can see from the link, the stories vary about exactly what their interaction with the manufacturer was, but it's clear that the company refused to release proprietary design files, forcing the volunteers to reverse-engineer the parts.)

The struggles of free software activists we've covered in the past to free the devices they use include:

• Software Freedom Conservancy executive director and Free Software Award winner Karen Sandler's efforts to raise the alarm about the dangers of proprietary software in medical devices, including her own pacemaker;

• The struggles of LibrePlanet speaker and OpenAPS co-founder Dana Lewis, and many others to help Type 1 diabetics take control of their medical treatment using an Artificial Pancreas System; and

• The efforts of many patients and activists to improve the effectiveness of their sleep apnea treatment by hacking their CPAP machines.

We've also seen how free software can deliver better health outcomes from our friends at GNU Health and GNU Health Embedded, and how the participation of everyday people in the scientific process can help to save the environment through Free Software Award winners Public Lab, and help in disaster relief through Free Software Award winners Sahana.

So it's clear that the free software community has a lot of creativity and know-how to contribute in the tough days ahead, and that with over 350,000 people worldwide stricken with COVID-19 as of this writing, we absolutely need to pitch in if we can help people to avoid illness, and to recover from coronavirus. We know that the 3D printing of medical equipment is distinctly not an advisable hobby for amateurs, and that the production of anything more complex than cloth masks will require expert input. But we also know that the outlook is bleak if supplies run short – and that shortages are almost certain.

That's why we're looking into what we can make with our in-office Respects Your Freedom (RYF)-certified 3D printers, and we're talking to the brand new Mass General Brigham Center for COVID Innovation so they can direct our efforts. We're also gathering resources for our "HACKERS and HOSPITALS" plan at the LibrePlanet wiki page, and if you have expertise, 3D printers, or supplies to contribute, please contact Michael via sysadmin@fsf.org. If you do not have the means to produce medical gear and you still want to help, research can be done from anywhere with only a computer and an Internet connection. Add any projects that are freely licensed working towards helping with COVID-19 to the wiki!

We've always believed that it's of crucial importance to human freedom and creativity to allow us to use all the tools at our disposal with no restrictions, and right now, we may be able to use the free software we've built, preserved, and advocated for together to save lives.

• automake-1.16.2
• bison-3.5.3
• coreutils-8.32
• ddrescue-1.25
• gcc-9.3.0
• guile-3.0.1
• gwl-0.2.1
• help2man-1.47.13
• hyperbole-7.1.1
• jacal-1c7
• mailutils-3.9
• mtools-4.0.24
• nano-4.9
• parallel-20200322
• swbis-1.13.2

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.

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.

On March 14 and 15, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) held LibrePlanet 2020: Free the Future online. The virtual edition of LibrePlanet was nothing short of a success, and it was quite a journey to get there.

Looking back to a week before the conference, we had an incredible lineup, exciting plans, and more new program elements than we've ever had before. With a new logo designed by campaigns intern Valessio Brito, a refresh to the LibrePlanet 2020 Web site, renewed focus on using the LibrePlanet wiki to collaborate, and with a new home at the Back Bay Events Center, we were ready to receive hundreds of free software supporters in Boston for another successful conference. And then everything changed.

Our in-person event suffered the consequences of the global COVID-19 pandemic, forcing us to make the difficult decision of bringing LibrePlanet 2020 online in order to protect our supporters, staff, and all the many interrelated communities. There was no time to pause and mourn: instead, the FSF team put our heads together fast and charted a new direction.

Within the scope of five days, we were able to move the conference from an in-person experience to a live streaming event, thanks to the heroic efforts of our talented tech team, our volunteers, and the flexibility and cooperation of our scheduled speakers, even some previously unscheduled ones. We hosted three sessions at a time for both days of the conference, bringing viewers thirty-five streamed talks from forty-five speakers, as well as eight lightning talks. Technical difficulties were few and far between, and when one of our speakers asked how many nations were tuning in, within the span of eighteen seconds, twelve countries were identified.

Hosting a fully virtual event was new for everyone involved, and on Saturday, we were happy to find out that everyone's efforts of the week leading into the conference paid off. We hosted our own Jitsi instance for remote speakers, using a screen capture of the video call to stream out to the world via Gstreamer and Icecast. Speakers all logged in during the week for testing, sometimes multiple times, to work through any technical difficulties, and ensure a smooth experience for viewing. Some speakers prerecorded their sessions and others joined live, but nearly all of them joined in the Freenode IRC channels for their Q&A sessions, which created a positive interactive social experience.

We will post a more detailed technical explanation, and some advice for other conference organizers based on our experience, soon. Our tech team is currently processing videos of all talks, and we will publish them for viewing in the conference video library. Some additional speaker resources have been posted on the LibrePlanet wiki. For the first time, by popular demand, we are also working on getting the audiostreams for the talks up via RSS feed, so you can discover talks or catch the ones you missed in your favorite podcasting app or RSS reader.

The winners of the 2019 Free Software Awards all accepted their awards by prerecorded video message. As the ceremony was conducted virtually this year, each winner selected the person to present them the award. Jim Meyering, who received the Award for the Advancement of Free Software, was virtually handed his award by founder of the GNU Project and the FSF, Richard Stallman, and sent in his acceptance speech from the UK. Clarissa Lima Borges, a young Brazilian developer, was digitally awarded the golden record for the new Award for Outstanding New Free Software Contributor by Alexandre Oliva, acting co-president of the FSF. Acting co-president and executive director John Sullivan presented the Award for Projects of Social Benefit, which went to Let's Encrypt, a nonprofit certificate authority that hopes to make encrypted Web traffic the default state of the entire Internet.

On day two, another diverse group of speakers called in to discuss the future of free software, casting light on the topic from their own individual fields of expertise. Licensing, government integration, community building, and other free software topics were discussed. Our speakers work with, and advocate for, free software in many different disciplines. We value seeing people with a wide range of perspectives commit to the core principles of free software. Over the weekend, we noticed many sessions highlighting how a movement like free software is carried by the strength of people who believe change is necessary and achievable. Speakers discussed the developments of federated social media and a decentralized Web, teaching free software to children, engaging young developers, community healing, as well as different applications of "public invention".

This focus on community and collaboration is a core idea behind the LibrePlanet network and conference, and the FSF has been working on plans to get the LibrePlanet community more involved in organizational aspects of the conference in the future, including session selection. This resonates with FSF executive director John Sullivan's announcement of our plans to create a working group documenting the obstacles facing free communication tools like Jitsi, which we used for the livestream, and how to encourage our friends and loved ones to turn away from chat and conferencing tools that do not respect their freedom. We want the world to be able to host virtual conferences like LibrePlanet without needing the technical expertise of an organization like the FSF behind them. With your help, we aim to make it as easy as getting some friends and participants together and pressing a button.

LibrePlanet 2020: Free the Future highlighted the capacity this community has to empower each other. We are so grateful for the support we received from our speakers, our viewers, IRC participants, associate members, and everyone who recognized the challenge we have been confronted with and decided to donate, as well as our volunteers, and exhibitors and sponsors. All of this support and enthusiasm made the disappointment of having to cancel the in-person event fade quickly, in return for much needed excitement to work tirelessly on this new challenge of streaming the entire conference online.

We're so proud to have demonstrated what free software is capable of. It would not have been possible without the extra work and positive responses from our speakers, the flexibility and commitment of our volunteers, or without the excitement, patience, and enthusiasm of our online participants. We look forward to seeing you again, in person next year, for LibrePlanet 2021!

Photo credits: Ruben Rodriguez, © 2020, Free Software Foundation, Inc. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

"GNUess" by David Revoy. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

This followed on the heels of the previous day's presentation of the Free Software Awards to Let's Encrypt, Jim Meyering, and Clarissa Lima Borges, along with Free Software Foundation (FSF) executive director John Sullivan's announcement of a new FSF-sponsored working group to document and address the problem of proprietary communication tools. Just like the first day, the FSF coordinated with remote speakers and viewers from around the world via a fully free streaming setup which, while not without its technical challenges, proved that putting on a high quality conference using only free software is indeed possible. And in a look into the future of LibrePlanet itself, FSF program manager Zoë Kooyman announced the FSF's plans to create a LibrePlanet Community Council, which could provide input on matters at the heart of the conference's organization.

Appropriate to the conference theme of "Free[ing] the Future," Shannon Dosemagen kicked off day two of the conference with her talk "For us, by us: Free technology, community science, and the pursuit of environmental problem solving." In a prerecorded talk delivered to the conference, she speculated about free software's ability to lend assistance to community science efforts aiming to address environmental concerns. Drawing from her work with Public Lab, a recipient of the 2017 Free Software Award for Projects of Social Benefit, Dosemagen used the 2010 BP oil disaster as a lens to view the progress of free technology for environmental monitoring. She then joined the conference remotely via Jitsi to take questions from a large audience in the LibrePlanet IRC channel on Freenode.

Following Shannon was a presentation connecting the free software movement with Mahatma Gandhi's Charkha movement, delivered by longtime free software activist and Unmukti Technology founder Nishant Sharma. Sharma was the first speaker that day to deliver a live talk and Q&A session from a remote location. Drawing parallels between the free software movement and Gandhi's method of political organization that prioritized self-sufficiency, Sharma discussed how the principles of the Charkha movement and the principles of the free software movement could mutually inform one another, creating the "Gandhian way to freedom and privacy." Also in this block was Lex Pan Law founder McCoy Smith's update on where the free software movement currently stands in its fight to end software patents. As the mere existence of software patents poses a threat to the continued success and longevity of free software, Smith's comprehensive explanation of recent key legal cases in the changing judicial interpretation of software patents was a great help to both newcomers and longtime veterans of the fight for user freedom.

"Community" is a concept we often highlight in discussions of free software, but there are certain geographic and national contexts in which adapting our work to every community becomes a challenge. How do we, as free software contributors, approach communities where more thank 25 different languages are spoken? Özcan Oğuz and Alper Atmaca from Özgür Yazılım Derneği addressed precisely this question, detailing their work translating free software materials into the wide variety of Anatolian languages, including Kurdish, Zazaki, Lazuri, and Homshetsi. Before their work, many of these communities were unable to use any type of software in their own language, let alone access documentation. Oğuz, who delivered the session remotely, and Atmaca, who was present in the FSF office, detailed their impressive work to localize GNOME, Firefox, and other core GNU/Linux programs into all of these languages.

While most of the conference focused on free software's moving forward, developer Dennis Payne looks back. In a session titled "Free software game restoration," Payne emphasized video games' importance to the cultural and historical record, and highlighted the problem of older free software games that no longer run on modern GNU/Linux systems. By utilizing our freedom to study and modify these early games, we can ensure that they're able to be played and enjoyed for years to come.

The movement to free the future was brought much closer to home with Sean O'Brien's presentation "GNU Health Embedded: An introduction," which gave an overview of recent updates to a version of the GNU Health project designed to work on pocket-sized computers. Targeting these platforms enables the program to be deployed into a wide variety of different environments, and optionally, defend its users' privacy through use of the Tor network. O'Brien gave several case scenarios for GNU Health's use in embedded environments while, in another session, recent Free Software Award winner for Outstanding New Contributor Clarissa Lima Borges explored the accessibility challenges non-technical users face when first coming to free software. Drawing from her work on improving user experience in GNOME, Borges's talk told the "love story" between free software and its users, and emphasized how relatively trivial changes to a program's visual design can go a long way in improving the user experience for all.

An online conference is nothing without some technical glitches and resolves. Speaker der.hans, whose talk was interrupted in the morning, returned in the afternoon to consider the future from a social media angle with his talk "Fediverse: Decentralized social networking and services." Der.hans gave users who may not be familiar with the federated Web's core concepts a crash course into popular free software server software like Mastodon, PeerTube, and Pixelfed.

Following O'Brien in the "Freedom" room of the conference were Devin Ulibarri and Walter Bender of Sugar Labs, who gave an overview of the project's developers, teachers, and students coming together to work on educational free software projects. Sugar Labs's application of this community effort is widely varied, ranging from hacking on introductory, visual programming languages to contributing to critical components of the Sugar OS distribution of the GNU/Linux operating system. This free spirit of collaboration continued on through Lori Nagel's talk on the reliance free software games have upon free cultural visual assets, the complex 2D drawings and 3D models that often have entire teams working on them to deliver a memorable experience. Notably, the focus of Nagel's talk was easy ways for those who enjoy free software games to start contributing to their favorite one, even if they currently lack programming skills.

In the "Patriot" room of the conference, developer Charles Lehner gave viewers a summary of the Secure Scuttlebutt project, an "offline-first" social networking protocol that allows its users to disconnect from the wider "web" and resync at any time -- making it ideal for those who live the nomadic, "solarpunk" lifestyle Lehner went on to describe. But things in the movement aren't always fun and games, and they aren't always especially clear either. Patrick Masson brought participants back into the "Grand" room of the virtual conference, delivering his talk "The Four Free-ums." As the movement is growing each day and attracts attention from both curious onlookers and big business, Masson reiterated the need for free software to stick to its founding principles, and what sets of tests successful free projects may have to overcome. He discussed how recent, "novel" takes on software freedom from outsiders at best leverage, or at worst, exploit the success of the four freedoms. This "free-washing" behavior is exactly what we recently called Microsoft out on with our Upcycle Windows 7 campaign.

Just like any other social justice movement, the push for software freedom has its share of conflicts and interpersonal rifts between users and different projects. A past LibrePlanet speaker and free software activist, Katheryn Sutter, addressed these issues in a presentation entitled "Community healing: Re-establishing norms, trust, and truth after crises." Using her years of experience in grassroots organizations, Sutter shed light on how free software activists can learn from the history of other political causes. In the "Patriot" room the topic presented on was more "hands-on," with Marc Jones and Robert Read giving viewers a demonstration of devices that extend free software principles into the world of public invention projects.

In his closing keynote, "Locking the Web open: A decentralized web that can operate as free software does," Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle revisited the explosive growth of the Internet over the first thirty years of its existence, and emphasized the importance of ensuring its original values are encoded into the framework of the Web itself. Kahle highlighted user privacy, free speech, and free access to knowledge as the key concepts that drove its original growth. In a big win for freedom, Kahle also announced that the Internet Archive has placed all the JavaScript that it has written itself and which it distributes to users visiting the Wayback Machine under the AGPLv3. "The Internet Archive generally distributes software under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL), but has released some software under other licenses," Kahle said. "In preparation for LibrePlanet 2020, we have declared the AGPLv3 license on JavaScript used on archive.org, web.archive.org (the Wayback Machine), and openlibrary.org. Live free!"

As you have likely noticed, LibrePlanet 2020's second day was jammed full with practical free software knowledge and inspiring calls to further action and improvement, enough so that users in the IRC conference rooms repeatedly expressed their anticipation of the final recorded videos. We couldn't agree more, and are working on getting the sessions transcoded and finalized as fast as we can! To help make these talks accessible for everyone, we're dependent on volunteer transcribers. Please send in any talk transcriptions to campaigns@fsf.org. It's been an exhilarating trip to turn a conference cancellation into a successful virtual conference in such a short amount of time, and all of us at the FSF deeply appreciate our speakers' and participants' support and enthusiasm for the future of free software. We'll see you at LibrePlanet 2021!

Stay well!

The LibrePlanet Team

Photo credits: Ruben Rodriguez, © 2020, Free Software Foundation, Inc. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Sometimes, all of your best-laid plans can go awry, and when COVID-19 collided with LibrePlanet 2020, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) staff and management had to make an incredibly tough decision: how were we to weigh the risk of a spreading pandemic against our most important yearly event? Within the space of a week, we had to change course from months of scrupulous planning and figure out how to ensure that our carefully-composed program could move forward, giving the worldwide free software community access to the experts, creators, and enthusiasts we had planned to bring together in Boston. We were incredibly excited to present this slate of free software luminaries and newcomers, all eager to discuss what it will take to "Free the Future," and we weren't about to let all of that effort go to waste.

Thankfully, free software activists aren't afraid of a little adversity, and are accustomed to taking on challenges. In only a few days, we fully shifted gears to deliver the LibrePlanet 2020 program remotely, with online talks streaming in from all over the world. We're so grateful to our speakers, who have been so flexible, and to the last-minute benefactors that volunteered to help fill any gaps that might ensue. All this allowed us to present you with a nearly full program for the event!

Usually the FSF office is packed to the seams with visitors from all over the world during our Friday night open house and our Saturday night hack night. While we had to discourage all visitors and volunteers from coming due to the COVID-19 risk, the office was still bustling all day, since it served as the home base for our online conference operation. Our intrepid copyright and licensing associate Craig Topham made a deep clean of the "pirate room," and the tech team worked practically overnight on our fully free streaming setup for 2020. The conference was brought to viewers around the world using entirely free software: our local Jitsi instance, Gstreamer and Icecast.

Today's program kicked off with a panel calculated to line up perfectly with the conference theme: the "Free the Future" keynote panel featured a group of talented hackers in their teens and early twenties, interviewed by FSF campaigns manager Greg Farough. Speakers Alyssa Rosenzweig, Taowa, and Erin Moon each shared stories of how they discovered free software, and shared insights they feel are essential to the future of the free software movement.

Alyssa, who interned at the FSF in 2018, spoke eloquently about how important it is for our community to come together: "We cannot let fear of future dystopia drive us, quibbling over semantics of our fear and burning out by the fires we chase, but rather must unite in constructive optimism propelling us to free the future." She added, "Optimism is also critical for we free software activists. We need to empathize and support each other as a community, not demonize imperfections. Measured against our dream utopia, none of us are perfect. Judging others is emotional mutiny to the movement. Judging ourselves, however, is a one-way ticket to activist burnout. But if we focus on the constructive love of freedom instead of the destructive forces we fight, our movement becomes sustainable..."

The morning's conversation turned on a variety of topics, including free software community building, mobile phone freedom, and the unique role decentralized (or "federated") social media plays when it comes to bringing users freedom. Taowa shared his experiences as a non-uploading Debian Developer, discussing the challenges of organizing Debian's own conference, DebConf. Erin, who came to free software by way of her work in digital signal processing, had special insights to share on how free software is poised to being people freedom on the Web.

The first morning session started on an creative note with a lesson in "Digital painting with Krita on GNU/Linux: Cute creature concept art" from French cartoonist David Revoy, whose Web comic Pepper&Carrot is created with an entirely free workflow. Revoy demonstrated the capabilities of the free software painting program Krita to draw two adorable GNU from start to finish. Other sessions were a presentation by journalist Lucy Ingham called "Rented future: The dangerous rise of life as a service," and an expert overview of free software in the US government by Karen Johnson and Fen Labalme.

In the next session, online viewers chose between learning about encryption with engineer DeeDee Lavinder, about free software community building in the US versus China with artist and programmer Giselle Jhunjhnuwala, and methods for educating students about the importance of ethical software with William Liggett. DeeDee gave viewers a crash course into the "huge topic" of encryption, which touches the lives of every software user, providing technical and non-technical users alike with a conceptual overview of free software encryption technology and its importance.

After a brief lunch break, sessions resumed with more lessons about free software communities from developer advocate JJ Asghar, a visit to the fascinating world of typography with Felipe Sanches, and a passionate motivation for broader use of free software from local high school student Ben O'Neill, who correctly points out that free software provides a far more environmentally sustainable model for computing than the "planned obsolescence" model embraced by most proprietary manufacturers.

The next time slot lined up a choice of interesting questions for online participants: would you prefer to learn about how copyleft can be used to disrupt the "smart device" dystopia from former FSF executive director Bradley Kuhn. Or, would you prefer to find out how free software can improve the future of farming, with a dynamic panel from the Gathering for Open Ag Tech (goatech.org)? Or, would you prefer a freewheeling metaphor comparing bicycles and free software, from perennial LibrePlanet speaker Wm "Salt" Hale? (Luckily, if you were having trouble deciding, you don't have to miss out on any of these -- videos of all of these talks will be available at the LibrePlanet video library).

Talks in the next session got down to practical nuts and bolts: where is free software being used in real life, and by whom? Robb Ebright explained how his community radio station uses LibreTime, an AGPLv3-licensed radio automation system, while Paul Gazillo and Joshua Santana explained how free software provides the best tools to enable free scientific inquiry, and Camille Akmut presented their study of exactly how diverse free software projects are (and aren't). All in all, it was an engaging look into the practical "future" of free software: both in terms of how we can welcome an ever-changing userbase into the community, as well as how free software can be used to transmit other kinds of messages out to the world.

The last multi-talk slot of the day included LibrePlanet 2019 keynote Micky Metts digging deeper into her thoughts on how we can control our own data, Document Foundation co-founder Italo Vignoli taking a look back at ten years in the life of LibreOffice. Micky painted a somewhat frightening picture about the future surveillance capitalism is creating for us -- and what we can and must do to stop it. On the other hand, Italo gave an overview of the successes the LibreOffice project has seen in such a short time, becoming a free software writing and presentation suite used by millions around the world.

Finally, the day ended with a keynote by FSF executive director John Sullivan, including the bestowal of the 2019 Free Software Awards. The winners had already been notified in advance (under ordinary circumstances, they would have been present and would each be giving a talk on Sunday). This gave the FSF the opportunity to praise the accomplishments of the three winners: longtime free software contributor and author Jim Meyering, talented newbie Clarissa Lima Borges, and the Let's Encrypt project. Each winner chose the person who would present them with the award. In fact, reaching out to the community is something we plan to do even more as we move forward with LibrePlanet 2021.

In his keynote address following the award presentation ceremony, Sullivan announced the beginning of a new working group on free software communication technology. True to the conference's mission to "free the future," this working group will combine the free software acumen of the FSF with experts working in the related fields. Together, the working group will identify and publicly document the most pressing issues facing the freedom of person-to-person communication, with the goal of having ethical solutions to virtual events, online education, and workplace collaboration. In a situation like the present COVID-19 pandemic, these are precisely the tools that we need.

This year's volunteering tasks were very different but no less essential than in the past, and we're so grateful for all of the volunteers helping out and taking the time to keep our IRC channels peaceful and orderly. We're also grateful for raffle donors Technoethical, Vikings, JMP, No Starch Press, and ThinkPenguin. Since we weren't able to organize an online raffle, we're scheming some fun ways to parcel out these goodies, so keep an eye on fsf.org for future announcements!

Join us for the second day of LibrePlanet 2020, streaming live to you tomorrow at 09:30 EDT!