Free Software Supporter, Issue 48, March 2012
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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
2012-04-02 FSF executive director, John Sullivan speaking at the CiviCRM conference -- CiviCon in Berkeley, CA -- http://www.fsf.org/events/20120402-berkeley and http://ur1.ca/8v71b
2012-04-02 Copyright vs. Community, Chicago, IL -- http://www.fsf.org/events/20120402-chicago
2012-04-03 Copyright vs. Community, Ashland, OR -- http://www.fsf.org/events/20120403-ashland
2012-04-04 For a Free Digital Society, Ashland, OR -- http://www.fsf.org/events/20120404-ashland
2012-04-21 Copyright vs. Community, Ljubljana, Slovenia -- http://www.fsf.org/events/20120421-ljubljana
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