The free software community spans the entire world, with supporters in nearly every corner of the globe, busily coding, tinkering, and spreading the word about the growing importance of controlling our computing. The Internet provides us with many great tools to share the latest news and advances, but ultimately, there’s nothing quite like meeting in person at the LibrePlanet conference! At LibrePlanet, you can meet other developers, activists, policy experts, students, and more, to make connections and help us strategize the future of free software.

REGISTER FOR LIBREPLANET 2019 HERE

LibrePlanet 2019 is only four months away, on March 23-24, here in the Greater Boston area. We’re already in high gear here at the Free Software Foundation (FSF): we’ve secured four amazing keynote speakers, and we’re hard at work putting together an exciting schedule. Session topics will include:

• Free software activism;

• Practical and creative applications of free software;

• Case studies;

• Legal and compliance issues;

• Fighting surveillance and defending our privacy; and much more!

LibrePlanet 2019's theme is "Trailblazing Free Software." In 1983, the free software movement was born with the announcement of the GNU Project. FSF founder Richard Stallman saw the dangers of proprietary code from the beginning: when code was kept secret from users, they would be controlled by the technology they used, instead of vice versa. In contrast, free software emphasized a community-oriented philosophy of sharing code freely, enabling people to understand how the programs they used worked, to build off of each other's code, to pay it forward by sharing their own code, and to create useful software that treated users fairly.

LibrePlanet boasts three days of free software activities, starting with a Friday night party at the FSF office in Boston. Saturday and Sunday are packed with conference sessions, lectures, workshops, lightning talks, and a party. To attend LibrePlanet, simply register online. Registration is gratis for FSF members, and $90 for both days or $60 for one day for non-members.

See you in March!

My name is Lei Zhao, and I often stylize it as Leei Jaw. I am one of the fall interns for the FSF tech team.

I first became aware of free software in the sense of freedom at the age of 19. I encountered free software even earlier, but it took some time to appreciate the free/libre aspect of free software.

I'm working on making changes to GitLab to improve the license selection for new projects. As written in the article, For Clarity's Sake, Please Don't Say “Licensed under GNU GPL 2”!:

"When sites such as GitHub invite developers to choose “GPL 3” or “GPL 2” among other license options, and don't raise the issue of future versions, this leads thousands of developers to leave their code's licensing unclear. Asking those users to choose between “only” and “or later” would lead them to make their code's licensing clear. It also provides an opportunity to explain how the latter choice avoids future incompatibility."

GitLab has the same problem, but it is free software, so I'm working to change that. This is the first time I've participated in such a large project, and I am very excited.

I learned my first programming language, Pascal, in high school. Then Python, Java, C/C++, Scala, JavaScript, SQL, and Lisp. The language I've used most often is Python, since it is the language I used for my past jobs. My primary editor is Emacs.

In my spare time, I like listening to music, and playing the guitar. When I have spare money, I enjoy driving recreational go-karts.

Interested in interning for the Free Software Foundation? The application period for spring 2019 internships is open until December 23, 2018 -- see details here.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) tech team works every day to maintain and improve the infrastructure that supports hundreds of free software projects, along with the FSF itself and its mission to create a world where all software is free. Will you propel the free software movement to new frontiers by supporting the FSF? Our annual fundraiser is happening right now, and we want to welcome 400 new Associate Members before December 31st. You can join for as little as $10 per month ($5 per month for students) or make a donation. As a special bonus, all new and renewing Annual Associate Members ($120+) can choose to receive a set of enamel pins. Become a member or make a donation today.

The FSF tech team has been busy over the last year. Our small three-person band supports FSF and GNU infrastructure, and we work hard to improve the services we provide. All of this infrastructure runs on free software and is self-hosted: for example, we use CiviCRM to manage events, campaigns, mailing lists, and our database of members; our new member forum is powered by Discourse; and we used tools like HUBAngl and GNU MediaGoblin to stream, record, and publish 30+ hours of video from LibrePlanet 2018. Much of our infrastructure is routinely under an impressive load -- the Mailman list server we run for hundreds of free software projects continues to spool out nearly a half-million messages per day.

We don't do this work alone. We are fortunate to have both a worldwide community of volunteers and a thriving internship program. The six interns we mentored over the past year have inspired us with their work and dedication. Projects they worked on include:

• A free software replacement for PayPal's nonfree JavaScript, which can be run from the command line;
• A physical system for remotely resetting unresponsive servers with freedom-respecting software;
• Upgrades and improvements to the Free Software Directory;
• The replacement of the GNU Image Manipulation Program's old JPEG codec with a well-maintained library;
• Researching site monitoring systems like Prometheus;
• Testing Pagure, a code collaboration platform; and
• Researching the code used for license selection in GitLab, to facilitate future patches.

Two of our interns came to us from Outreachy, which connects under-represented people with paid internships working on free software projects. In addition to completing the above specific projects, our interns are now better prepared to take on future challenges within free software. We're proud that we helped them deepen their involvement in the movement.

We rely on volunteers to provide and maintain services to support thousands of free software developers around the world. An important part of what we do as staff is make sure those volunteers have what they need. Volunteers continue to maintain Savannah, which hosts both GNU and non-GNU code, and to take care of https://www.gnu.org and its translations.

In addition to supporting free software development and advocacy by others, the team also directly funds some upstream contributions. We are not just users of free software -- we also submit patches and bug reports to the projects we rely on. When we have the resources, we fund extra development in areas that are particularly important for user freedom. This year, we contracted with the author of the popular browser extension NoScript to do major improvements on GNU LibreJS, giving a significant boost to the campaign for protecting users against proprietary JavaScript.

We also use our position as technical representatives of an established institution in the world of free software to attract new kinds of resources to the movement. Currently, we are working with students at the UC Berkeley Blueprint program to develop software which will enable people around the world to more easily support the free software movement both financially and with their activist energy.

We've done a lot this year, but there are also many projects we didn't get to, and new projects that we want to take on in 2019. We want to spend more time directly supporting and improving the GNU Project infrastructure beyond the maintenance of the services we host. We would like to provide better options for developers who want to host their projects with organizations that share their commitment to free software principles; we want to be offering a more attractive public online presence for the FSF itself; and we need to show that a nonprofit can be best-in-class in its operations and at its mission without giving up its freedom to Service as a Software Substitute or proprietary software.

Thanks to the generous donations we've received this past year, we are building our capacity to take on these challenges. Ruben Rodriguez, formerly a senior systems administrator, has taken on a new role as our chief technology officer. Ruben's new role affords him time each week to continue contributing to Trisquel, a fully free GNU/Linux operating system. Andrew Engelbrecht, previously our Web developer, has joined Ian Kelling as a senior systems administrator, which means we're currently hiring for a Web developer. We're excited to be growing from a trio to a quartet, but we also know we could keep a whole orchestra productively busy.

In order to continue our work and push free software to new frontiers, the FSF tech team needs your help. Much like free software itself, the FSF is only as strong as the communities of users and contributors that support it. I encourage you to do what you can to give us the boost we need to start 2019 strong.

Yours in freedom,

Andrew Engelbrecht, Senior Systems Administrator,
and the Free Software Foundation Tech Team

• bison-3.2.2
• emms-5.1
• gnuhealth-3.4.0
• guile-cv-0.2.1
• icecat-60.3.0
• indent-2.2.11
• libextractor-1.8
• libmicrohttpd-0.9.60
• libredwg-0.6.2
• librejs-7.18.1
• mit-scheme-10.1.1
• mtools-4.0.21
• nano-3.2
• orgadoc-1.0
• parallel-20181122
• pspp-1.2.0
• swbis-1.13.1
• unrtf-0.21.10

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 Adam Bilbrough as the new maintainer of mcron.

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 the end-of-the-year gift-giving season approaches, we have a dilemma: how do we give the people in our lives the gifts they want without subjecting them to software that violates their user freedoms? So many new gadgets are loaded with digital gremlins that can take all of the fun out of the holidays, using proprietary software to sneak in surveillance, Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), and other malware in along with the functions we actually want these items to serve.

Every year, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) offers you an easy solution: our Ethical Tech Giving Guide! The Giving Guide is back with version 9, and loaded with tech you can feel good about giving your loved ones -- and it also highlights some dangerous devices that are better left on the shelf.

We create resources like the Ethical Tech Giving Guide because software freedom is necessary to our overall freedom. Will you propel the free software movement to new frontiers by supporting the FSF? Our annual fundraiser is happening right now, and we want to welcome 400 new Associate Members before December 31st. As a special bonus, all new and renewing Annual Associate Members ($120+) can choose to receive a set of enamel pins. Become a member or make a donation today.

2018 has been an exciting year for user freedom. There have been multiple new additions to our Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification program, with around 50 new products just waiting to be reviewed. Many of the products in the Giving Guide are RYF-certified, so you can give them knowing you're giving the most ethical technical toys you can. The Giving Guide has a huge assortment of digital gifts that will delight your family and friends, including:

• Digital media, including ebooks and movies;
  
• Laptops and tablets;
  
• 3D printers;
  
• Accessories to help keep your computer as free as you want it to be; and
  
• A list of nonprofit charities working hard for your digital rights.

When you're buying gifts this year, please remember that we're not just trying to protect ourselves from spyware, surveillance, and other threats brought on by proprietary software. This encroachment of our rights as users doesn't just affect us. It's not enough to choose to not buy a Google Home or Amazon Alexa for ourselves -- we need to help keep these proprietary technologies out of the homes of our families, friends, and loved ones. We can do this by educating them about threats and helping them to make better choices -- and to give you a hand, we've included talking points with each Giving Guide item to explain why the proprietary alternative is a bad buy.

Share the Guide with your friends and use it yourself! Host a Giving Guide Giveaway. You can tell your story about using the Guide on social media by tagging @fsf or using the hashtag #givefreely.

Happy holidays and happy hacking!