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Read and share online: https://www.fsf.org/free-software-supporter/2023/april

Welcome to the Free Software Supporter, the Free Software
Foundation's (FSF) monthly news digest and action update -- being read
by you and 230,846 other activists. That's 258 more than last month!

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• From Freedom Trail to free boot and free farms: Charting the course at LibrePlanet day two


• Reporting back from day one of LibrePlanet: Charting the Course


• Free Software Awards winners announced: Eli Zaretskii, Tad (SkewedZeppelin), GNU Jami


• Board process update: FSF asks nominees to confirm their interest


• Right to repair advocate Elizabeth Chamberlain to keynote FSF's LibrePlanet


• EU: Proposed liability rules will harm free software


• John Deere's ongoing GPL violations: What's next


• Signal threatens to pull out of UK


• New repository format for faster and smaller updates


• March GNU Emacs news


• Join the FSF and friends in updating the Free Software Directory


• LibrePlanet featured resource: Fight to repair


• March GNU Spotlight with Amin Bandali: Twelve new GNU releases!


• FSF and other free software events


• Thank GNUs!


• GNU copyright contributions


• Translations of the Free Software Supporter


• Take action with the FSF!

View this issue online here: https://www.fsf.org/free-software-supporter/2023/april

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From Freedom Trail to free boot and free farms: Charting the course at LibrePlanet day two

From March 20

The second day of LibrePlanet featured many inspiring talks on a wide
range of topics from privacy in digital payments and on the web to a
live release of the latest version of Trisquel, an FSF endorsed
fully-free distribution of GNU/Linux. At the end of the day, we heard
from a panel in a session called "It's time to jailbreak the farm."
Dr. Elizabeth Chamberlain, director of sustainability at iFixit, gave
the evening keynote and spoke, amongst other things, about the threat
that Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) presents to one's ability
to repair wheelchairs, phones, and other devices. She exposed the
unjust practice of tractor manufacturers such as John Deere, whose
proprietary "full diagnostic software is only available to dealers."

• https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/from-freedom-trail-to-free-boot-and-free-farms-charting-the-course-at-libreplanet-day-2

Reporting back from day one of LibrePlanet: Charting the Course

From March 18

The first day of LibrePlanet sessions, which was held both online and
in person, started with an exploration of free licensing trademarks
and a report of "Libre software in Africa." The opening keynote,
titled "Education and the future of software freedom" was held by
researcher and educator Erin Rose Glass of Social Paper. Glass's talk
covered the role higher education plays in cultivating passive
acceptance of broad forms of digital surveillance and control through
popular educational technologies like learning management systems,
word-processing software, and test-taking tools, which are all
pervasive within contemporary education. She presented the many
obstacles teachers and students are facing today, while presenting a
mixture of possible solutions. Read the full blog post to learn more
about these and other course-charting talks.

• https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/reporting-back-from-day-one-of-libreplanet-charting-the-course

Free Software Awards winners announced: Eli Zaretskii, Tad (SkewedZeppelin), GNU Jami

From March 18

The winners in three categories, each recognizing exemplary
achievements in the field of free software, are GNU Jami, Eli
Zaretskii, and Tad (SkewedZeppelin).

The 2022 Award for Outstanding New Free Software Contributor went to
Tad (SkewedZeppelin), chief developer of the DivestOS
project. DivestOS is a fork of the nonfree Android mobile operating
system that removes many proprietary binaries, and which puts freedom,
security, and device longevity as its main concerns. Tad has also
contributed to the Replicant distribution of Android, a project
fiscally sponsored by the FSF. GNU Jami was this year's winner of the
Award for Project of Social Benefit, which is presented to a project
or team responsible for applying free software, or the ideas of the
free software movement, to intentionally and significantly benefit
society. Eli Zaretskii, co-maintainer of GNU Emacs, was this year's
winner of the Award for the Advancement of Free Software.

• https://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-awards-winners-announced-eli-zaretskii-tad-skewedzeppelin-gnu-jami

Board process update: FSF asks nominees to confirm their interest

From March 16

The FSF board of directors would like to thank all associate members
who answered the call for nominations and nominated candidates to
serve on the FSF board of directors. This week marks a next step in
the FSF's process to finding new board members. Thanks to our
associate members, nominated individuals will receive a questionnaire
to accept their nomination.

The next step in the evaluation process will be for the FSF voting
members to review the nominees' answers. They will select some
nominees as "candidates" to move forward into the board nomination
process, possibly in multiple rounds.

• https://www.fsf.org/news/board-process-update-fsf-asks-nominees-to-confirm-their-interest

Right to repair advocate Elizabeth Chamberlain to keynote FSF's LibrePlanet

From March 2

Elizabeth Chamberlain is director of sustainability at iFixit and a
passionate advocate of the right to repair. iFixit sells repair parts
and publishes gratis repair guides for electronic devices such as
smartphones, tractors, and toasters on their website. With these,
iFixit helps thousands of people repair their devices every day
instead of throwing them away. In early March, Chamberlain was
announced as one of the keynotes for this year's LibrePlanet, now in
its fifteenth edition. The event has ended, but publication of videos
and slides of all the sessions, including Chamberlain's keynote, are
expected to be published in the coming weeks.

• https://www.fsf.org/news/right-to-repair-advocate-elizabeth-chamberlain-to-keynote-fsfs-libreplanet

EU: Proposed liability rules will harm free software

From March 23 by Free Software Foundation Europe

The EU is currently debating the introduction of liability rules for
software, including free software. The relevant proposals are the AI
Act, Product Liability Directive (PLD), and Cyber Resilience Act
(CRA). As they are written now, all proposals stand to harm free
software developers with insurmountable economical burdens. The Free
Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has proposed a solution that will
lead to more security while safeguarding free software and its
distribution: Liability should be shifted to those deploying free
software instead of those developing free software; and those who
significantly benefit financially from this deployment should make
sure the software becomes CE-compliant (Conformité
Européene-compliant).

• https://fsfe.org/news/2023/news-20230323-01.en.html

John Deere's ongoing GPL violations: What's next

From March 16 by Denver Gingerich

In a recent article by Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), they
publicly call on John Deere to: "immediately resolve all of its
outstanding GNU General Public License (GPL) violations, across all
lines of its farm equipment, by providing complete source code,
including 'the scripts used to control compilation and installation of
the executable' that the GPL and other copyleft licenses require, to
the farmers and others who are entitled to it, by the licenses that
Deere chose to use." As was demonstrated at Australian hacker Sick
Code's talk at this year's LibrePlanet, a lot of the code running on
John Deere tractors is copyleft free software, which means that John
Deere has an obligation under the terms of the license to distribute
the source code to its customers.

• https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/mar/16/john-deere-gpl-violations/

Signal threatens to pull out of UK

From March 1 by Emma Woollacott

Threatened by the prospect that private encryption communication may
be deemed illegal in the UK as early as May of this year, the Signal
Technology Foundation has announced it will stand up for encryption
even if that means pulling out of the country. The so-called "Online
Safety Bill" proposes requirements such as compulsory "client-side
scanning" in applications for encrypted communication. In a strongly
worded message to the community, Meredith Whittaker, the leader of the
nonprofit, said, "Encryption is either broken for everyone, or it
works for everyone. There is no way to create a safe backdoor."

Note: While Signal itself has nonfree dependencies, there is a fully
free fork of Signal called "Silence" available in F-Droid.

• https://cybernews.com/news/signal-to-leave-uk/


• https://signal.org/blog/uk-online-safety-bill/

Signal is not the only organization objecting to the online safety
bill, which threatens all end-to-end encryption platforms in the UK,
and therefore journalists, freedom fighters, and marginalized
people. At the time of writing, this bill (link below) has passed
through the House of Commons, and is currently at committee stage in
the House of Lords.

• https://www.securityweek.com/uk-introduces-mass-surveillance-with-online-safety-bill/

One action that everyone reading this can take is to educate yourself
and others about encryption by reading and sharing our Email
Self-Defense guide: https://emailselfdefense.fsf.org/

New repository format for faster and smaller updates

From March 1 by Torsten Grote

The developers of the official F-Droid client have released version
1.16, which has some important updates. A client and repository for
mobile devices that distributes only free software applications,
F-Droid is itself free
software and runs on the
Android operating system, including free forks of Android such as
Replicant.

The latest version has many updates and bug fixes, but one of the most
significant updates is how the application updates its repository
index, which has grown over the years. Their repository index is in
JSON format, and the developers have decided to make use of a new
feature to create much smaller JSON files that identify and download
changes since the F-Droid app's most recent update. The result is
quicker updates of the lists, so that users can see what new software
and updates are available more quickly. More technical details are
available in the announcement.

• https://f-droid.org/en/2023/03/01/new-repo-format-faster-smaller-updates.html

March GNU Emacs news

From March 27 by Sacha Chua

In these issues: A link to a video on how to use GNU Calc*, creating
manuals and including them into Emacs, "How an uber-geeky text mode in
a forty-year-old editor saved my novel," and more!

• 2023-March-27


• 2023-March-20


• 2023-March-13


• 2023-March-06

* Videos such as this can be watched in freedom via
Invidious

Join the FSF and friends in updating the Free Software Directory

Tens of thousands of people visit directory.fsf.org each month to
discover free software. Each entry in the Directory contains a wealth
of useful information, from basic category and descriptions to version
control, IRC channels, documentation, and licensing. The Free Software
Directory has been a great resource to software users over the past
decade, but it needs your help staying up-to-date with new and
exciting free software projects.

To help, join our weekly IRC meetings on Fridays. Meetings take place
in the #fsf channel on Libera.Chat, and usually include a handful of
regulars as well as newcomers. Libera.Chat is accessible from any IRC
client -- Everyone's welcome!

The next meeting is Friday, April 7 from 12:00 to 3:00 EDT (16:00 to
19:00 UTC). Details here:

• https://www.fsf.org/events/fsd-20230407-irc

LibrePlanet featured resource: Fight to Repair

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

For this month, we are highlighting Fight to Repair, which provides
information about the role of free software in the right to repair
movement. You are invited to adopt, spread and improve this important
resource.

• https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:FSF/Fight-to-Repair

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

March GNU Spotlight with Amin Bandali: Twelve new GNU releases!

Twelve new GNU releases in the last month (as of March 31, 2023):

• a2ps-4.15.3


• coreutils-9.2


• grep-3.10


• guile-cv-0.4.0


• indent-2.2.13


• mcron-1.2.3


• mtools-4.0.43


• octave-8.1.0


• orgadoc-1.3


• parallel-20230322


• r-4.2.3


• texinfo-7.0.3

For a full list with descriptions, please see: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/march-gnu-spotlight-with-amin-bandali-twelve-new-gnu-releases

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 most reliably from
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/. Optionally, you may find faster download
speeds at a mirror located geographically closer to you by choosing
from the list of mirrors published at
https://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html, or you may use
https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a
(hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.

This month, we welcome Samuel Thibault as maintainer of GNU Hurd.

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 me, bandali@gnu.org, with
any GNUish questions or suggestions for future installments.

FSF and other free software events

• April 10, 2023, Online, LibrePlanet workshop -- Newk Script: Code Katas to learn programming by Reynaldo Cordero


• April 24, 2023, Online, LibrePlanet workshop -- The immortal cookbook by Adam Monsen


• April 24-25, 2023, Gothenburg, Sweden, FOSS North 2023


• May 1, 2023, Online, LibrePlanet workshop -- Metacartes: A free/libre toolbox to chart the course to an ethical digital by Lilian Ricaud and Mélanie Lacayrouze


• July 13-16, 2023, Oregon Convention Center, Portland, OR FOSSY

Thank GNUs!

We appreciate everyone who donates to the Free Software Foundation,
and we'd like to give special recognition to the folks who have
donated $500 or more in the last month.

• https://www.gnu.org/thankgnus/2023supporters.html

This month, a big Thank GNU to:

• Adam Oberbeck


• Andy Kopra


• Fredrick Brennan


• James Wilson


• Kam VedBrat


• Morten Lind


• 
  
  1. Scott Belford
  
  
  
  


• Raffael Stocker


• Russell Hernandez Ruiz


• Steven Shiau

You can add your name to this list by donating at
https://donate.fsf.org/.

GNU copyright contributions

Assigning your copyright to the Free Software Foundation helps us
defend the GNU GPL and keep software free. The following individuals
have assigned their copyright to the FSF (and allowed public
appreciation) in the past month:

• Simon Pugnet (GNU Emacs)

Want to see your name on this list? Contribute to GNU and assign your
copyright to the FSF.

• https://www.gnu.org/server/takeaction.html#dev

Translations of the Free Software Supporter

El Free Software Supporter está disponible en español. Para ver la
versión en español haz click aquí:
https://www.fsf.org/free-software-supporter/2023/abril

Para cambiar las preferencias de usuario y recibir los próximos
números del Supporter en español, haz click aquí:
https://my.fsf.org/civicrm/profile/create?reset=1&gid=34&id=59606&cs=d7a60668ad53c1a5cac08fb4ecc23d12_1680565999_168

Le Free Software Supporter est disponible en français. Pour voir la
version française cliquez ici:
https://www.fsf.org/free-software-supporter/2023/avril

Pour modifier vos préférences et recevoir les prochaines
publications du Supporter en français, cliquez ici:
https://my.fsf.org/civicrm/profile/create?reset=1&gid=34&id=59606&cs=d7a60668ad53c1a5cac08fb4ecc23d12_1680565999_168

Take action with the FSF!

Contributions from thousands of individual associate members enable
the FSF's work. You can contribute by joining at
https://my.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!
https://my.fsf.org/join

The FSF is always looking for
volunteers. From rabble-rousing to
hacking, from issue coordination to envelope stuffing -- there's
something here for everybody to do. Also, head over to our campaigns
section and take action on software
patents, Digital Restrictions
Management, free
software adoption,
OpenDocument,
and more.

Do you read and write Portuguese and English? The FSF is looking
for translators for the Free Software Supporter. Please send an
email to campaigns@fsf.org with your interest and a list of your
experience and qualifications.

Copyright © 2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.