Older blog entries for mattl (starting at number 695)

4 May 2012 (updated 4 May 2012 at 22:10 UTC) »

Coalition against Digital Restrictions Management ready to go for May 4th Day Against DRM

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA -- Thursday, May 3, 2012 -- Defective by Design will hold its annual International Day Against DRM on Friday, May 4th, targeting the use of Digital Restrictions Management on ebooks. Several other organizations have joined to express their concern for the freedoms of authors and readers, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, O'Reilly Media, No Starch Press, the Accessible Computing Foundation, Libre Graphics Magazine, Fight for the Future, Angry Robot Books, APRIL, the Free Software Foundation and its sister organizations, FSF France, FSF India and FSF Europe.

Matt Lee, campaigns manager of Defective by Design, said, "DRM is a growing problem in the area of ebooks, where people have had their books restricted so they can't freely loan, re-sell or donate them, read them without being tracked, or move them to a new device without re-purchasing all of them. They've even had their ebooks deleted by companies without their permission."

As part of the day, people fed up with DRM are holding protest and awareness events in Cincinnati, Orlando, Amherst, San Francisco, Boston, Madrid, Rome, Manchester, Nagoya (Japan), and Aveiro (Portugal). More events are still being added at http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:DefectiveByDesign/Day_Against_DRM_2012.

Supporters are also taking action online, displaying the campaign's banner and using the opportunity to blog about their frustrations with DRM.

Notable science fiction author and editor of the influential BoingBoing.net blog, Cory Doctorow said, "As an author, I understand that DRM doesn't do squat to protect my interests. As a businessperson, I understand that DRM usurps my commercial relationships with my customers and hands them to DRM vendors."

Sanders Kleinfeld, author of HTML5 for publishers said in an interview with O'Reilly Media, "What's disappointing right now is that Amazon is very set on their Mobi format for their Kindle device, Apple has made strides away from EPUB 3 with their latest iBooks 2.0 and iBooks Author. I think vendors that make these devices are interested in maintaining that lock-in for customers."

Defective by Design has held previous international days against DRM in 2006, 2010 and 2011, focusing on use of DRM by Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and the RIAA. Defective by Design is a campaign of the Free Software Foundation.

Information on how to participate can be found at http://dayagainstdrm.org. Pictures, videos, and accounts will be posted afterward at http://defectivebydesign.org.

About the Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in freedom) software -- particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants -- and free documentation for free software. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of freedom in the use of software, and its Web sites, located at fsf.org and gnu.org, are an important source of information about GNU/Linux. Donations to support the FSF's work can be made at http://donate.fsf.org. Its headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA.

Media Contacts

Matt Lee
Campaigns Manager
Free Software Foundation
+1-617-500-3284
campaigns@fsf.org

#

Syndicated 2012-05-04 17:00:41 (Updated 2012-05-04 22:10:04) from Free Software Foundation

30 Apr 2012 (updated 30 Apr 2012 at 23:07 UTC) »

FSF Job Opportunity: Operations Assistant

The Free Software Foundation (FSF), a 501(c)(3) charity with a worldwide mission to protect freedoms critical to the computer-using public, seeks a motivated and organized Boston-based individual to be its full-time Operations Assistant.

This position works closely with the Executive Director and Business Operations Manager to ensure all administrative functions of the FSF run smoothly and efficiently, preserving our 4-star Charity Navigator rating and boosting all areas of our work.

In addition to handling phone calls and being a friendly face for visitors to our office at the center of Boston's Downtown Crossing, these functions include:

  • fulfilling orders for FSF merchandise,
  • blogging about merchandise-related news,
  • processing incoming donations,
  • coordinating volunteers,
  • updating our contact database,
  • organizing fundraising mailings,
  • diverting sales calls to the appropriate fake voicemail box,
  • assisting with occasional local events,
  • maintaining a few areas of our Web site, and
  • looking after the office space.

This is a great position for a recent graduate who thrives on multitasking, has an eye for detail, lives in the Boston area, and wants to make a difference. With our small staff of ten, each person makes a clear contribution. We work hard, but offer a humane and fun work environment.

Because our mission is worldwide, language skills and a demonstrated ability to interact with people across cultures and age groups will be highly valued. While the position does not require advanced computer skills, a willingness to learn and work with new software is a must. We use free software like CiviCRM, Plone, Emacs, and LibreOffice, all running on GNU/Linux.

The FSF is a growing organization and provides great potential for advancement; existing staff get the first chance at any new job openings. Previous Operations Assistants have often gone on to hold other positions within the organization.

Benefits and salary

This job is a union position. The salary is fixed at $49,140/year and is non-negotiable. Other benefits include the following:

  • full family health coverage through Blue Cross/Blue Shield's HMO Blue program,
  • subsidized dental plan,
  • four weeks of paid vacation annually,
  • seventeen paid holidays annually,
  • public transit commuting cost reimbursement,
  • 403(b) program through TIAA-CREF, and
  • yearly cost-of-living pay increases.

Resumes and cover letters must be submitted via email to hiring@fsf.org. The email must contain the subject line, "Operations Assistant". Resumes should be attached in text, PDF, or OpenDocument. No Word documents, please. Email submissions that do not follow these instructions will be ignored.

Applications must be received by Sunday, May 13th.

The FSF is an equal opportunity employer and will not discriminate against any employee or application for employment on the basis of race, color, marital status, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, handicap, or any other legally protected status recognized by federal, state or local law.

About the Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in freedom) software -- particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants -- and free documentation for free software. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of freedom in the use of software, and its Web sites, located at fsf.org and gnu.org, are an important source of information about GNU/Linux. Donations to support the FSF's work can be made at http://donate.fsf.org. Its headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA.

Syndicated 2012-04-30 20:43:14 (Updated 2012-04-30 23:07:50) from Free Software Foundation

30 Apr 2012 (updated 14 May 2012 at 20:17 UTC) »

[Closed] Operations Assistant at the Free Software Foundation

This position works closely with the Executive Director and Business Operations Manager to ensure all administrative functions of the FSF run smoothly and efficiently, preserving our 4-star Charity Navigator rating and boosting all areas of our work.

More information on the FSF news site.

Syndicated 2012-04-30 20:37:23 (Updated 2012-05-14 20:17:21) from Free Software Foundation

Can you help Groklaw monitor the Google/Oracle trial?

The Groklaw website needs your help to update the community on the trial proceedings.

  • You will need to be physically present at the courtroom and take notes on who says what.
  • You don't have to be a legal expert. Just be the eyes and ears for the community.
  • The trial has begun and will run for 8-10 weeks in San Francisco.

If you're able to help, please email PJ at Groklaw -- pj2 at groklaw.net. She will give you more information.

Syndicated 2012-04-24 20:11:31 from Free Software Foundation

French presidential elections 2012 and free software

The French free software advocacy group April asked all of the candidates in the upcoming French presidential elections about their positions on free software, software patents, DRM and more.

At the moment, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, le Front de Gauche for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Eva Joly and François Bayrou have answered (in French). Fleur Pellerin, in charge of François Hollande's digital economy program has sent in her answers. April is still waiting for answers from Nicolas Sarkozy and Jean-Marie le Pen, although they both answered in 2007.

A full press release is available in English and responses from the various candidates are available in French.

Syndicated 2012-04-24 19:50:53 from Free Software Foundation

Other uses for your USB member card

There was a discussion on our member forums that suggested you couldn't change the structure of your USB member card. Here's a guide on doing just that.

First, insert your USB member card into your computer — for this demonstration, I'm using Trisquel GNU/Linux (which comes on the most recent cards) but any of the distributions on our list will work.

Once inserted, you should see two new drives pop up or appear on the desktop.

One will be called 'casper-rw' and one will be called 'liveusb'. In this example, we're going to wipe the card and use it as a typical USB memory stick, where it can be loaded with another distribution or used to store files.

To start the process of wiping the card, we first need to erase both of these virtual drives, or partitions from the USB drive. For this, I'm going to use a graphical partition editor called gparted.

Because gparted should be run by an administrator, I'm going to run it with the gksudo program, which will prompt me for my computer's administrator password and then run the program as the adminstrator user.

Once loaded, gparted will show you all of the partitions on the USB drive. Be sure to select the correct drive from the list at the top-right of the screen. In general, the USB stick will be approximately 900, 1800 or 3700MB in size, depending on when you joined as an associate member.

Next, you'll need to 'unmount' these drives from your computer, so we can remove them — this stops other programs from writing files to the drive while we erase it.

To do this, simply right-click on both the 'casper-rw' and 'liveusb' partitions, and choose 'Unmount' from the menu.

Once unmounted, the partitions can be deleted.

Once they have both been deleted you will see a large area of unused space on the drive. You can click the 'New' button to make a new partition in this space.

Choose the kind of file system you want carefully: if the drive needs to be used on Windows and Mac computers, choose FAT32. If you are only using it on GNU/Linux, then ext2, ext3 and ext4 are all good choices.

Finally, click the apply button to make all the changes to your card. When completed, your card is ready for you to install new distributions onto it, or use it to copy files.

Send us your feedback on this article to campaigns@fsf.org.

Syndicated 2012-04-09 18:37:31 from Free Software Foundation

GNU spotlight with Karl Berry (March 2012)

This month we welcome Michael Talbot-Wilson as the new maintainer of GNU Sather, and Imed Ben Heni as a new co-maintainer of GNU kopi. We also welcome Alexandre Oliva as the maintainer of linux-libre, the longstanding basis for the kernel component of most entirely-free GNU/Linux systems http://www.gnu.org/distros/, newly dubbed as an official GNU package.

We also welcome Jose Luis Garcia Pallero as the new maintainer of the GNU Scientific Library (GSL). Jose would very much appreciate additional volunteers! Please contact him through the usual GSL lists.

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

Several GNU packages are looking for maintainers and other assistance. There's also a general page on how to help GNU, and information on how to submit new packages to GNU.

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

Syndicated 2012-04-02 15:47:27 from Free Software Foundation

Free Software Supporter, Issue 48, March 2012

Encourage your friends to subscribe and help us build an audience by adding our subscriber widget to your web site.

Miss an issue? You can catch up on back issues at http://www.fsf.org/free-software-supporter.

Multilingual? Send translations of the Supporter to campaigns@fsf.org.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

  • LibrePlanet 2012
  • 2011 Free Software Awards announced
  • Happy Document Freedom Day!
  • Happy Birthday GCC!
  • Free Technology Academy 2012 courses
  • Reports from the latest Trans-Pacific Partnership Stakeholder Forum
  • A passage to India
  • Restricted Boot Webcomic Contest
  • Brazilian patent office software patent consultation
  • "The problem with software patents? They don't scale..."
  • GNU spotlight with Karl Berry
  • Richard Stallman's speaking schedule and other FSF events
  • Take action with the FSF!

LibrePlanet 2012

Thanks to everyone who came to our LibrePlanet 2012 conference. We'll be publishing recordings, slides and further information in the coming weeks.

2011 Free Software Awards announced

Each year at LibrePlanet, two awards are given: the Award for the Advancement of Free Software to an individual who has made a great contribution to free software, and the Award for Projects of Social Benefit to a project that intentionally and significantly benefits society.

This year, Yukihiro Matsumoto, the creator of the Ruby programming language, won the Award for the Advancement of Free Software for his contributions to free software in the past 20 years.

GNU Health, a free software project that works with health professionals around the world to improve the lives of the underprivileged, won the Award for Projects of Social Benefit.

Happy Document Freedom Day!

Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global day for document liberation that is celebrated on the last Wednesday of every March since 2008, and which is organized and funded by the Free Software Foundation Europe.

We proposed several ways to celebrate that day!

Happy Birthday GCC!

On March 22th, the GCC development team celebrated the 25th anniversary of the GNU Compiler Collection which was first released in 1987.

Happy birthday, GCC!

Free Technology Academy 2012 courses

The Free Technology Academy is a global community and network of academic and social organizations active in the fields of Free Software, Standards and Hardware.

The FTA expects to run two course modules for users and systems administrators who want to get started with GNU/Linux systems. A discount on Free Technology Academy courses is available for FSF associate members.

Reports from the latest Trans-Pacific Partnership Stakeholder Forum

FSF's compliance engineer Brett Smith went to Melbourne, Australia to advocate for software freedom at the latest round of negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.

He came back with good news: technology industry groups are now more vocally expressing their concerns and explicitly positioning themselves opposite big copyright companies.

A passage to India

During January and February, Richard Stallman was in India -- giving speeches about free software in Kochi, Angamaly, Kanpur, Delhi, Ghaziabad, Kolkata, Guwahati, Chennai, Tiruchengode, Coimbatore, and Hyderabad.

Thanks to all the people who attended and sent us some great photos from the events, we've published a gallery of images:

And if you went to any of these events, please visit the appropriate form linked from the gallery and give us your contact information, so we can tell you the next time RMS is coming to town.

Restricted Boot Webcomic Comic

At the end of February asked you make a webcomic to help us raise awareness and put pressure on Microsoft and computer makers about the Restricted Boot issue. We've received a bunch of submissions and we'll be judging them in the next week or two...

Brazilian patent office software patent consultation

Brazil's patent office has launched a consultation about granting software patents. The patent office's page about the consultation is here:

Our End Software Patents campaign has more information in English.

"The problem with software patents? They don't scale"

Timothy B. Lee and Christina Mulligan have published a good article at Ars Technica:

LibrePlanet featured resource: Document Freedom Day 2012

Every month on LibrePlanet, we highlight one resource that is interesting and useful -- often one that could use your help.

For this month, we are highlighting Document Freedom Day 2012, which provides information about activism supporting OpenDocument and other free formats. You are invited to adopt, spread and improve this important resource.

Do you have a suggestion for next month's featured resource? Let us know at campaigns@fsf.org.

GNU Spotlight with Karl Berry

New releases from various GNU projects this month:

  • bzr-2.5.0
  • ccrtp-2.0.3
  • classpath-0.99
  • coreutils-8.16
  • dico-2.2
  • freeipmi-1.1.3
  • gcc-4.4.7
  • gcc-4.6.3
  • gcc-4.7.0
  • gcide-0.51
  • glibc-2.15
  • global-6.2.2
  • gnuchess-6.0.2
  • gnuhealth-1.4.4
  • gnupg-2.0.19
  • gnushogi-1.4.0
  • gnutls-2.12.18
  • gnutls-3.0.17
  • grep-2.11
  • help2man-1.40.7
  • libtasn1-2.12
  • linux-libre-3.3-gnu
  • parallel-20120322
  • parted-3.1
  • shishi-1.0.1
  • xboard-4.6.0
  • zile-2.4.7

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 Michael Talbot-Wilson as the new maintainer of GNU Sather, and Imed Ben Heni as a new co-maintainer of GNU kopi. We also welcome Alexandre Oliva as the maintainer of linux-libre, the longstanding basis for the kernel component of most entirely-free GNU/Linux systems http://www.gnu.org/distros/, newly dubbed as an official GNU package.

We also welcome Jose Luis Garcia Pallero as the new maintainer of the GNU Scientific Library (GSL). Jose would very much appreciate additional volunteers! Please contact him through the usual GSL lists.

Several other GNU packages 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 GNU, 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.

Richard Stallman's speaking schedule and other FSF events

Take action with the FSF

Contributions from thousands of individual members enable the FSF's work. You can contribute by joining at http://www.fsf.org/join. If you're already a member, you can help refer new members (and earn some rewards) by adding a line with your member number to your email signature like:

I'm an FSF member -- Help us support software freedom! http://www.fsf.org/jf?referrer=2442

The FSF is also always looking for volunteers (http://www.fsf.org/volunteer). From rabble-rousing to hacking, from issue coordination to envelope stuffing -- there's something here for everybody to do. Also, head over to our campaign section (http://www.fsf.org/campaigns) and take action on software patents, DRM, free software adoption, OpenDocument, RIAA and more.

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The Free Software Supporter is edited by FSF volunteer Osama Khalid.

Copyright © 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

Syndicated 2012-04-02 15:40:05 from Free Software Foundation

Free Software Supporter

The Free Software Supporter will keep you up-to-date each month on news from the free software movement. It is edited by FSF volunteer and member Osama Khalid. If you have suggestions for news items that should be included, please send them to us at campaigns@fsf.org.

Back issues

Syndicated 2012-04-02 15:38:05 from Free Software Foundation

28 Mar 2012 (updated 2 Apr 2012 at 17:09 UTC) »

2011 Free Software Awards announced

The Award for the Advancement of Free Software is given annually to an individual who has made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software, through activities that accord with the spirit of free software.

Yukihiro Matsumoto and Richard Stallman.

This year, it was given to Yukihiro Matsumoto (aka Matz), the creator of the Ruby programming language. Matz has worked on GNU, Ruby, and other free software for over 20 years. He accepted the award in person and spoke at the conference on his early experiences with free software, especially the influence of GNU Emacs on Ruby.

Yukihiro Matsumoto joins a distinguished list of previous winners:

  • 2010 Rob Savoye
  • 2009 John Gilmore
  • 2008 Wietse Venema
  • 2007 Harald Welte
  • 2006 Ted Ts'o
  • 2005 Andrew Tridgell
  • 2004 Theo de Raadt
  • 2003 Alan Cox
  • 2002 Lawrence Lessig
  • 2001 Guido van Rossum
  • 2000 Brian Paul
  • 1999 Miguel de Icaza
  • 1998 Larry Wall

The Award for Projects of Social Benefit is presented to the project or team responsible for applying free software, or the ideas of the free software movement, in a project that intentionally and significantly benefits society in other aspects of life. This award stresses the use of free software in the service of humanity.

Luis Falcon and Richard Stallman.

This year, the award went to GNU Health, a free software project that works with health professionals around the world to improve the lives of the underprivileged. GNU Health has been adopted as the Health and Hospital Information System of choice by the United Nations University. Luis Falcon, the president of GNU Solidario (the organization behind GNU Health), was present to accept the award on behalf of the project.

GNU Health joins an impressive list of previous winners:

  • 2010 Tor
  • 2009 Internet Archive
  • 2008 Creative Commons
  • 2007 Groklaw
  • 2006 Sahana Disaster Management System
  • 2005 Wikipedia

This year's award committee was: Suresh Ramasubramanian, Peter H. Salus, Wietse Venema, Raj Mathur, Hong Feng, Andrew Tridgell, Jonas Oberg, Vernor Vinge, Richard Stallman, Fernanda G. Weiden, Harald Welte, and Rob Savoye.

About the Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in freedom) software -- particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants -- and free documentation for free software. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of freedom in the use of software, and its Web sites, located at fsf.org and gnu.org, are an important source of information about GNU/Linux. Donations to support the FSF's work can be made at http://donate.fsf.org. Its headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA.

Media Contacts

John Sullivan
Executive Director
Free Software Foundation
+1 (617) 542 5942
campaigns@fsf.org

High resolution press photos

Photos under CC BY 3.0 Attribution by Jason X Self.

#

Syndicated 2012-03-28 22:23:50 (Updated 2012-04-02 17:09:11) from Free Software Foundation

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