*Please consider adding to your address book, which will ensure that our messages reach you and not your spam box.*
*Read and share online: *
Welcome to the *Free Software Supporter*, the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) monthly news digest and action update -- being read by you and 231,664 other activists.
### When we work together, we achieve our goals
*From July 31*
July 28, 2023 marked the end of our most recent associate member drive. We appreciate the community that helped us extend our reach, are proud of every single associate member who is supporting our work, and are immensely thankful for all the donations we received. This membership drive started slow, so we called for your help, and you answered our call: we saw a surge of forty-five new associate members in the week of the extension -- for a total of 111 new members joining since the launch of the member drive. This shows once more: **when we work together we can achieve our goals.** A big thank you to all those who shared our appeal, put our banner on their websites, and/or gifted memberships to their friends or family members. Every new member is one person more who proudly carries the free software message into the world.
* *
## TABLE OF CONTENTS
* "Web Environment Integrity" is an all-out attack on the free Internet * From pro-democracy activists to minorities: Why people use Tor and encrypted chats * The campaigns team and the community work together for free software * The second round of FSF board candidate discussions started July 24 * Spring *Bulletin*: From privacy-respecting browser extensions to natural disaster relief * Look behind the scenes of the FSF tech team * Working together for free software licensing * RISC-V finds its foothold * Software freedom & trademarks: Examining Rust's new policy through the lens of free software history * July GNU Emacs news * Join the FSF and friends in updating the Free Software Directory * LibrePlanet featured resource: LibrePlanet Pages that Need Work * July GNU Spotlight with Amin Bandali: Ten 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:
Encourage your friends to subscribe and help us build an audience by adding our subscriber widget to your website.
* Subscribe: * Widget:
Miss an issue? You can catch up on back issues at .
Want to read this newsletter translated into another language? Scroll to the end to read the *Supporter* in French or Spanish.
### "Web Environment Integrity" is an all-out attack on the free Internet
*From July 28*
Using a free browser is now more important than ever. The so-called "Web Environment Integrity" (WEI) API, which is poised to restrict users via their browsers, is the worst stunt we've seen from Google in some time. Beginning its life as an innocuous, if worrying, policy document posted to Microsoft GitHub, Google has now fast-tracked its development into their Chromium browser. At its current rate of progress, WEI -- which basically amounts to *Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) in the browser* -- will be upon us in no time. Read why WEI is terrible, and why we must vocally oppose it now. Google's latest maneuver, if we don't act to stop it, threatens our freedom to explore the Internet with browsers of our choice.
*
### From pro-democracy activists to minorities: Why people use Tor and encrypted chats
*From July 27*
Read the stories of people who are protecting their privacy with free software, why they choose freedom and privacy, and why we must continue to fight to protect our freedoms. Learn about a political activist who was harassed by her government for speaking up; how people in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China use the Tor network to access censored websites like Wikipedia; and how members of the queer community in Egypt, for example, are increasingly resorting to encrypted chats in order to keep their communication hidden from the prying eyes of the police.
*
### The campaigns team and the community work together for free software
*From July 25*
This month, we published three new *Working Together for Free Software* profiles. While their voices may be those of just a small fraction of the community, we hope their outstanding dedication to the free software movement will inspire you. We hope that you'll share them with others, too, under the #WorkingTogether hashtag. Our first profile follows two developers, Adrien and Sébastien, from the Free Software Award-winning GNU Jami project, a free as in freedom solution for private videoconferencing. Next, we hear from fellow Free Software Award winner Protesilaos Stavrou on what motivates his work on GNU Emacs. We round out the updates to the *Working Together* profiles with an interview of Ali Miracle, a developer with the Uruk project. Each of these three new profiles comes with an accompanying article with complete responses to interview questions posed by our campaigns team.
* * * *
### The second round of FSF board candidate discussions started July 24
The FSF board has chosen a second round of candidates as part of its board process. All eligible associate members can participate in this discussion to get involved in the FSF's ongoing search for new board members. The second round candidates are Luis Guzmán, Maria Chiara Pievatolo, Markus Schmidt, and Jason Self. As documented in the board process, FSF associate members are invited to discussions considering these candidates in the nominee discussion forum. This discussion round opened on July 24 and is planned to close six weeks later. Participants must pledge to abide by the participation agreement.
* *
### Spring *Bulletin*: From privacy-respecting browser extensions to natural disaster relief
*From July 13*
The 2023 spring *Free Software Foundation Bulletin* is now online! Read about free software's role in the right to repair movement, privacy-oriented browser plugin JShelter, a freedom-enabled volunteer rescue response to an earthquake, an overview of licensing talks from this year's LibrePlanet, and a report from the FSF's tech team on how this year's hybrid LibrePlanet was broadcast live with free software.
*
### Look behind the scenes of the FSF tech team
*From July 11*
This article gives a glimpse behind the scenes of recent work done by the FSF tech team. Read about Prometheus network security, completion of member data migration from an old system to a new system, system software upgrades, and other work done by the team to keep critical infrastructure running reliably every day.
*
### Working together for free software licensing
*From July 6*
Our copyright & licensing associate Craig Topham is continuously working together with free software developers, lawyers, and volunteers to assist the community with their licensing questions, finding hardware that respects your freedom, and keeping the public informed of interesting free software projects. In this article, Craig shares some of the accomplishments the Licensing and Compliance Lab achieved during the last six months.
*
### RISC-V finds its foothold
*From July 28 by Agam Shah*
RISC-V, a processor architecture under a free license, is improving at an increasingly rapid pace since its debut nearly a decade ago. The attention it is receiving by developers globally is encouraging to those of us who use free software and care about their privacy since it promises to empower us with a replacement for proprietary processor architectures such Intel and AMD, which [give remote access to their manufacturers by design](https://u.fsf.org/2fo). This article also reports on the recent gains made to supporting free software generally on RISC-V processing architecture.
*
### Software freedom & trademarks: Examining Rust's new policy through the lens of free software history
*From July 27 by Denver Gingerich*
This article, recently published by the Software Freedom Conservancy, examines the programming language Rust's new trademark policy through the lens of history. Other similar trademark policies in the past such as Java's, PHP's, and Mozilla's have had consequences for the free software community. Inform yourself about this relevant and important topic by examining these case studies, and use this knowledge to prepare yourself for the inevitable discussions ahead.
*
### July GNU Emacs news
*From July 31 by Sacha Chua*
In these issues: *What is GNU Emacs* for beginners, displaying an analog clock and playing Tetris in GNU Emacs, editing Scalar Vector Graphic (SVG) files, many new MELPA packages, and more!
### 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, August 4 from 12:00 to 15:00 EDT (16:00 to 19:00 UTC). Details here:
*
### LibrePlanet featured resource: LibrePlanet Pages that Need Work
Every month on [the LibrePlanet wiki](https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Main_Page), we highlight one resource that is interesting and useful -- often one that could use your help.
For this month, we are highlighting the LibrePlanet Pages that Need Work page, which in itself needs some work! You are invited to add to this page, which is a list of pages from the LibrePlanet wiki that need work.
*
Also, please join our second ever LibrePlanet Wiki Edit Fest, happening Wednesday, August 23 from 12:30 to 14:00 EDT (16:30 to 18:00 UTC). Details here:
*
Do you have a suggestion for next month's featured resource? Let us know at .
### July GNU Spotlight with Amin Bandali: Ten new GNU releases!
Ten new GNU releases in the last month (as of July 27, 2023):
For announcements of most new GNU releases, subscribe to the info-gnu mailing list: .
To download: nearly all GNU software is available most reliably from . Optionally, you may find faster download speeds at a mirror located geographically closer to you by choosing from the list of mirrors published at , or you may use to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.
This month, we welcome Adrien Bourmault and Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli as co-maintainers of the new package GNU Boot, a free boot firmware distribution for initializing your hardware and booting your operating system.
A number of GNU packages, as well as the GNU operating system as a whole, are looking for maintainers and other assistance. Please see if you'd like to help. The general page on how to help GNU is at .
If you have a working or partly working program that you'd like to offer to the GNU project as a GNU package, see .
As always, please feel free to write to me, , with any GNUish questions or suggestions for future installments.
### FSF and other free software events
* August 23, 2023, Online, [LibrePlanet Wiki Edit Fest](https://www.fsf.org/events/2023-08-23-libreplanet-wiki-edit-fest) * September 27, 2023, Volkhaus, Biel, Switzerland, [GNU 40](https://www.gnu.org/gnu40/) * October 15-17, 2023, Raleigh Convention Center, Raleigh, NC, [ATO](https://2023.allthingsopen.org/) * November 3-4, 2023, Online and Seattle, WA, [SeaGL](https://seagl.org/) * November 10-11, 2023, NOI Techpark, Bolzano/Bozen, Italy, [SFSCon](https://www.sfscon.it/) * December 2-3, 2023, Online, [EmacsConf](https://emacsconf.org/2023/)
### 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.
*
This month, a big Thank GNU to:
* Antoine Mercadal * Blue Systems * Christian Sperr * David Harding * Donald Haase * Eric Lewis * Félicien Pillot * Great old one Cthulhu * John Keith Hohm * Mr. Pete Batard * René Genz * Sondre Steinsland Hegdal
You can add your name to this list by donating at .
### 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:
* Jeffrey Bencteux (GNU Inetutils) * John Muhl (GNU Emacs) * Matheus Branco Borella (GDB) * Sergey Alexandrovich Bugaev (GCC, GDB, GNU C Library, GNU Hurd, GNU Mach, GNUstep) * Wang Diancheng (GNU Emacs)
Want to see your name on this list? Contribute to GNU and assign your copyright to the FSF.
*
### Translations of the *Free Software Supporter*
El *Free Software Supporter* está disponible en español. Para ver la versión en español haz click aquí:
**Para cambiar las preferencias de usuario y recibir los próximos números del *Supporter* en español, haz click aquí:**
Le *Free Software Supporter* est disponible en français. Pour voir la version française cliquez ici:
**Pour modifier vos préférences et recevoir les prochaines publications du *Supporter* en français, cliquez ici:**
### Take action with the FSF!
Contributions from thousands of individual associate members enable the FSF's work. You can contribute by joining at . 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! >
The FSF is always looking for [volunteers](https://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 [campaigns section](https://www.fsf.org/campaigns) and [take action on software patents](https://endsoftwarepatents.org/), [Digital Restrictions Management](https://www.defectivebydesign.org/), [free software](https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Freedom_Ladder) adoption, [OpenDocument](https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/opendocument/download), 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 with your interest and a list of your experience and qualifications.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit .
-- * Follow us on Mastodon at , GNU social at , PeerTube at , and on Twitter at -at-fsf. * Read about why we use Twitter, but only with caveats: * Subscribe to our RSS feeds: * Join us as an associate member: * Read our Privacy Policy:
Sent from the Free Software Foundation,
51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor Boston, Massachusetts 02110-1335 United States
You can unsubscribe from this mailing list by visiting
Welcome to the Free Software Supporter, the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) monthly news digest and action update -- being read by you and 231,664 other activists.
When we work together, we achieve our goals
From July 31
July 28, 2023 marked the end of our most recent associate member drive. We appreciate the community that helped us extend our reach, are proud of every single associate member who is supporting our work, and are immensely thankful for all the donations we received. This membership drive started slow, so we called for your help, and you answered our call: we saw a surge of forty-five new associate members in the week of the extension -- for a total of 111 new members joining since the launch of the member drive. This shows once more: when we work together we can achieve our goals. A big thank you to all those who shared our appeal, put our banner on their websites, and/or gifted memberships to their friends or family members. Every new member is one person more who proudly carries the free software message into the world.
Want to read this newsletter translated into another language? Scroll to the end to read the Supporter in French or Spanish.
"Web Environment Integrity" is an all-out attack on the free Internet
From July 28
Using a free browser is now more important than ever. The so-called "Web Environment Integrity" (WEI) API, which is poised to restrict users via their browsers, is the worst stunt we've seen from Google in some time. Beginning its life as an innocuous, if worrying, policy document posted to Microsoft GitHub, Google has now fast-tracked its development into their Chromium browser. At its current rate of progress, WEI -- which basically amounts to Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) in the browser -- will be upon us in no time. Read why WEI is terrible, and why we must vocally oppose it now. Google's latest maneuver, if we don't act to stop it, threatens our freedom to explore the Internet with browsers of our choice.
From pro-democracy activists to minorities: Why people use Tor and encrypted chats
From July 27
Read the stories of people who are protecting their privacy with free software, why they choose freedom and privacy, and why we must continue to fight to protect our freedoms. Learn about a political activist who was harassed by her government for speaking up; how people in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China use the Tor network to access censored websites like Wikipedia; and how members of the queer community in Egypt, for example, are increasingly resorting to encrypted chats in order to keep their communication hidden from the prying eyes of the police.
The campaigns team and the community work together for free software
From July 25
This month, we published three new Working Together for Free Software profiles. While their voices may be those of just a small fraction of the community, we hope their outstanding dedication to the free software movement will inspire you. We hope that you'll share them with others, too, under the #WorkingTogether hashtag. Our first profile follows two developers, Adrien and Sébastien, from the Free Software Award-winning GNU Jami project, a free as in freedom solution for private videoconferencing. Next, we hear from fellow Free Software Award winner Protesilaos Stavrou on what motivates his work on GNU Emacs. We round out the updates to the Working Together profiles with an interview of Ali Miracle, a developer with the Uruk project. Each of these three new profiles comes with an accompanying article with complete responses to interview questions posed by our campaigns team.
The second round of FSF board candidate discussions started July 24
The FSF board has chosen a second round of candidates as part of its board process. All eligible associate members can participate in this discussion to get involved in the FSF's ongoing search for new board members. The second round candidates are Luis Guzmán, Maria Chiara Pievatolo, Markus Schmidt, and Jason Self. As documented in the board process, FSF associate members are invited to discussions considering these candidates in the nominee discussion forum. This discussion round opened on July 24 and is planned to close six weeks later. Participants must pledge to abide by the participation agreement.
Spring Bulletin: From privacy-respecting browser extensions to natural disaster relief
From July 13
The 2023 spring Free Software Foundation Bulletin is now online! Read about free software's role in the right to repair movement, privacy-oriented browser plugin JShelter, a freedom-enabled volunteer rescue response to an earthquake, an overview of licensing talks from this year's LibrePlanet, and a report from the FSF's tech team on how this year's hybrid LibrePlanet was broadcast live with free software.
This article gives a glimpse behind the scenes of recent work done by the FSF tech team. Read about Prometheus network security, completion of member data migration from an old system to a new system, system software upgrades, and other work done by the team to keep critical infrastructure running reliably every day.
Our copyright & licensing associate Craig Topham is continuously working together with free software developers, lawyers, and volunteers to assist the community with their licensing questions, finding hardware that respects your freedom, and keeping the public informed of interesting free software projects. In this article, Craig shares some of the accomplishments the Licensing and Compliance Lab achieved during the last six months.
RISC-V, a processor architecture under a free license, is improving at an increasingly rapid pace since its debut nearly a decade ago. The attention it is receiving by developers globally is encouraging to those of us who use free software and care about their privacy since it promises to empower us with a replacement for proprietary processor architectures such Intel and AMD, which give remote access to their manufacturers by design. This article also reports on the recent gains made to supporting free software generally on RISC-V processing architecture.
Software freedom & trademarks: Examining Rust's new policy through the lens of free software history
From July 27 by Denver Gingerich
This article, recently published by the Software Freedom Conservancy, examines the programming language Rust's new trademark policy through the lens of history. Other similar trademark policies in the past such as Java's, PHP's, and Mozilla's have had consequences for the free software community. Inform yourself about this relevant and important topic by examining these case studies, and use this knowledge to prepare yourself for the inevitable discussions ahead.
In these issues: What is GNU Emacs for beginners, displaying an analog clock and playing Tetris in GNU Emacs, editing Scalar Vector Graphic (SVG) files, many new MELPA packages, and more!
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, August 4 from 12:00 to 15:00 EDT (16:00 to 19:00 UTC). Details here:
LibrePlanet featured resource: LibrePlanet Pages that Need Work
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 the LibrePlanet Pages that Need Work page, which in itself needs some work! You are invited to add to this page, which is a list of pages from the LibrePlanet wiki that need work.
Also, please join our second ever LibrePlanet Wiki Edit Fest, happening Wednesday, August 23 from 12:30 to 14:00 EDT (16:30 to 18:00 UTC). Details here:
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 Adrien Bourmault and Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli as co-maintainers of the new package GNU Boot, a free boot firmware distribution for initializing your hardware and booting your operating system.
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.
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:
Jeffrey Bencteux (GNU Inetutils)
John Muhl (GNU Emacs)
Matheus Branco Borella (GDB)
Sergey Alexandrovich Bugaev (GCC, GDB, GNU C Library, GNU Hurd, GNU Mach, GNUstep)
Wang Diancheng (GNU Emacs)
Want to see your name on this list? Contribute to GNU and assign your copyright to 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:
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.
*Please consider adding to your address book, which will ensure that our messages reach you and not your spam box.*
*Read and share online: *
Welcome to the *Free Software Supporter*, the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) monthly news digest and action update -- being read by you and 231,664 other activists.
### When we work together, we achieve our goals
*From July 31*
July 28, 2023 marked the end of our most recent associate member drive. We appreciate the community that helped us extend our reach, are proud of every single associate member who is supporting our work, and are immensely thankful for all the donations we received. This membership drive started slow, so we called for your help, and you answered our call: we saw a surge of forty-five new associate members in the week of the extension -- for a total of 111 new members joining since the launch of the member drive. This shows once more: **when we work together we can achieve our goals.** A big thank you to all those who shared our appeal, put our banner on their websites, and/or gifted memberships to their friends or family members. Every new member is one person more who proudly carries the free software message into the world.
* *
## TABLE OF CONTENTS
* "Web Environment Integrity" is an all-out attack on the free Internet * From pro-democracy activists to minorities: Why people use Tor and encrypted chats * The campaigns team and the community work together for free software * The second round of FSF board candidate discussions started July 24 * Spring *Bulletin*: From privacy-respecting browser extensions to natural disaster relief * Look behind the scenes of the FSF tech team * Working together for free software licensing * RISC-V finds its foothold * Software freedom & trademarks: Examining Rust's new policy through the lens of free software history * July GNU Emacs news * Join the FSF and friends in updating the Free Software Directory * LibrePlanet featured resource: LibrePlanet Pages that Need Work * July GNU Spotlight with Amin Bandali: Ten 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:
Encourage your friends to subscribe and help us build an audience by adding our subscriber widget to your website.
* Subscribe: * Widget:
Miss an issue? You can catch up on back issues at .
Want to read this newsletter translated into another language? Scroll to the end to read the *Supporter* in French or Spanish.
### "Web Environment Integrity" is an all-out attack on the free Internet
*From July 28*
Using a free browser is now more important than ever. The so-called "Web Environment Integrity" (WEI) API, which is poised to restrict users via their browsers, is the worst stunt we've seen from Google in some time. Beginning its life as an innocuous, if worrying, policy document posted to Microsoft GitHub, Google has now fast-tracked its development into their Chromium browser. At its current rate of progress, WEI -- which basically amounts to *Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) in the browser* -- will be upon us in no time. Read why WEI is terrible, and why we must vocally oppose it now. Google's latest maneuver, if we don't act to stop it, threatens our freedom to explore the Internet with browsers of our choice.
*
### From pro-democracy activists to minorities: Why people use Tor and encrypted chats
*From July 27*
Read the stories of people who are protecting their privacy with free software, why they choose freedom and privacy, and why we must continue to fight to protect our freedoms. Learn about a political activist who was harassed by her government for speaking up; how people in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China use the Tor network to access censored websites like Wikipedia; and how members of the queer community in Egypt, for example, are increasingly resorting to encrypted chats in order to keep their communication hidden from the prying eyes of the police.
*
### The campaigns team and the community work together for free software
*From July 25*
This month, we published three new *Working Together for Free Software* profiles. While their voices may be those of just a small fraction of the community, we hope their outstanding dedication to the free software movement will inspire you. We hope that you'll share them with others, too, under the #WorkingTogether hashtag. Our first profile follows two developers, Adrien and Sébastien, from the Free Software Award-winning GNU Jami project, a free as in freedom solution for private videoconferencing. Next, we hear from fellow Free Software Award winner Protesilaos Stavrou on what motivates his work on GNU Emacs. We round out the updates to the *Working Together* profiles with an interview of Ali Miracle, a developer with the Uruk project. Each of these three new profiles comes with an accompanying article with complete responses to interview questions posed by our campaigns team.
* * * *
### The second round of FSF board candidate discussions started July 24
The FSF board has chosen a second round of candidates as part of its board process. All eligible associate members can participate in this discussion to get involved in the FSF's ongoing search for new board members. The second round candidates are Luis Guzmán, Maria Chiara Pievatolo, Markus Schmidt, and Jason Self. As documented in the board process, FSF associate members are invited to discussions considering these candidates in the nominee discussion forum. This discussion round opened on July 24 and is planned to close six weeks later. Participants must pledge to abide by the participation agreement.
* *
### Spring *Bulletin*: From privacy-respecting browser extensions to natural disaster relief
*From July 13*
The 2023 spring *Free Software Foundation Bulletin* is now online! Read about free software's role in the right to repair movement, privacy-oriented browser plugin JShelter, a freedom-enabled volunteer rescue response to an earthquake, an overview of licensing talks from this year's LibrePlanet, and a report from the FSF's tech team on how this year's hybrid LibrePlanet was broadcast live with free software.
*
### Look behind the scenes of the FSF tech team
*From July 11*
This article gives a glimpse behind the scenes of recent work done by the FSF tech team. Read about Prometheus network security, completion of member data migration from an old system to a new system, system software upgrades, and other work done by the team to keep critical infrastructure running reliably every day.
*
### Working together for free software licensing
*From July 6*
Our copyright & licensing associate Craig Topham is continuously working together with free software developers, lawyers, and volunteers to assist the community with their licensing questions, finding hardware that respects your freedom, and keeping the public informed of interesting free software projects. In this article, Craig shares some of the accomplishments the Licensing and Compliance Lab achieved during the last six months.
*
### RISC-V finds its foothold
*From July 28 by Agam Shah*
RISC-V, a processor architecture under a free license, is improving at an increasingly rapid pace since its debut nearly a decade ago. The attention it is receiving by developers globally is encouraging to those of us who use free software and care about their privacy since it promises to empower us with a replacement for proprietary processor architectures such Intel and AMD, which [give remote access to their manufacturers by design](https://u.fsf.org/2fo). This article also reports on the recent gains made to supporting free software generally on RISC-V processing architecture.
*
### Software freedom & trademarks: Examining Rust's new policy through the lens of free software history
*From July 27 by Denver Gingerich*
This article, recently published by the Software Freedom Conservancy, examines the programming language Rust's new trademark policy through the lens of history. Other similar trademark policies in the past such as Java's, PHP's, and Mozilla's have had consequences for the free software community. Inform yourself about this relevant and important topic by examining these case studies, and use this knowledge to prepare yourself for the inevitable discussions ahead.
*
### July GNU Emacs news
*From July 31 by Sacha Chua*
In these issues: *What is GNU Emacs* for beginners, displaying an analog clock and playing Tetris in GNU Emacs, editing Scalar Vector Graphic (SVG) files, many new MELPA packages, and more!
### 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, August 4 from 12:00 to 15:00 EDT (16:00 to 19:00 UTC). Details here:
*
### LibrePlanet featured resource: LibrePlanet Pages that Need Work
Every month on [the LibrePlanet wiki](https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Main_Page), we highlight one resource that is interesting and useful -- often one that could use your help.
For this month, we are highlighting the LibrePlanet Pages that Need Work page, which in itself needs some work! You are invited to add to this page, which is a list of pages from the LibrePlanet wiki that need work.
*
Also, please join our second ever LibrePlanet Wiki Edit Fest, happening Wednesday, August 23 from 12:30 to 14:00 EDT (16:30 to 18:00 UTC). Details here:
*
Do you have a suggestion for next month's featured resource? Let us know at .
### July GNU Spotlight with Amin Bandali: Ten new GNU releases!
Ten new GNU releases in the last month (as of July 27, 2023):
For announcements of most new GNU releases, subscribe to the info-gnu mailing list: .
To download: nearly all GNU software is available most reliably from . Optionally, you may find faster download speeds at a mirror located geographically closer to you by choosing from the list of mirrors published at , or you may use to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.
This month, we welcome Adrien Bourmault and Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli as co-maintainers of the new package GNU Boot, a free boot firmware distribution for initializing your hardware and booting your operating system.
A number of GNU packages, as well as the GNU operating system as a whole, are looking for maintainers and other assistance. Please see if you'd like to help. The general page on how to help GNU is at .
If you have a working or partly working program that you'd like to offer to the GNU project as a GNU package, see .
As always, please feel free to write to me, , with any GNUish questions or suggestions for future installments.
### FSF and other free software events
* August 23, 2023, Online, [LibrePlanet Wiki Edit Fest](https://www.fsf.org/events/2023-08-23-libreplanet-wiki-edit-fest) * September 27, 2023, Volkhaus, Biel, Switzerland, [GNU 40](https://www.gnu.org/gnu40/) * October 15-17, 2023, Raleigh Convention Center, Raleigh, NC, [ATO](https://2023.allthingsopen.org/) * November 3-4, 2023, Online and Seattle, WA, [SeaGL](https://seagl.org/) * November 10-11, 2023, NOI Techpark, Bolzano/Bozen, Italy, [SFSCon](https://www.sfscon.it/) * December 2-3, 2023, Online, [EmacsConf](https://emacsconf.org/2023/)
### 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.
*
This month, a big Thank GNU to:
* Antoine Mercadal * Blue Systems * Christian Sperr * David Harding * Donald Haase * Eric Lewis * Félicien Pillot * Great old one Cthulhu * John Keith Hohm * Mr. Pete Batard * René Genz * Sondre Steinsland Hegdal
You can add your name to this list by donating at .
### 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:
* Jeffrey Bencteux (GNU Inetutils) * John Muhl (GNU Emacs) * Matheus Branco Borella (GDB) * Sergey Alexandrovich Bugaev (GCC, GDB, GNU C Library, GNU Hurd, GNU Mach, GNUstep) * Wang Diancheng (GNU Emacs)
Want to see your name on this list? Contribute to GNU and assign your copyright to the FSF.
*
### Translations of the *Free Software Supporter*
El *Free Software Supporter* está disponible en español. Para ver la versión en español haz click aquí:
**Para cambiar las preferencias de usuario y recibir los próximos números del *Supporter* en español, haz click aquí:**
Le *Free Software Supporter* est disponible en français. Pour voir la version française cliquez ici:
**Pour modifier vos préférences et recevoir les prochaines publications du *Supporter* en français, cliquez ici:**
### Take action with the FSF!
Contributions from thousands of individual associate members enable the FSF's work. You can contribute by joining at . 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! >
The FSF is always looking for [volunteers](https://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 [campaigns section](https://www.fsf.org/campaigns) and [take action on software patents](https://endsoftwarepatents.org/), [Digital Restrictions Management](https://www.defectivebydesign.org/), [free software](https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Freedom_Ladder) adoption, [OpenDocument](https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/opendocument/download), 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 with your interest and a list of your experience and qualifications.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit .
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Welcome to the Free Software Supporter, the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) monthly news digest and action update -- being read by you and 231,664 other activists.
When we work together, we achieve our goals
From July 31
July 28, 2023 marked the end of our most recent associate member drive. We appreciate the community that helped us extend our reach, are proud of every single associate member who is supporting our work, and are immensely thankful for all the donations we received. This membership drive started slow, so we called for your help, and you answered our call: we saw a surge of forty-five new associate members in the week of the extension -- for a total of 111 new members joining since the launch of the member drive. This shows once more: when we work together we can achieve our goals. A big thank you to all those who shared our appeal, put our banner on their websites, and/or gifted memberships to their friends or family members. Every new member is one person more who proudly carries the free software message into the world.
Want to read this newsletter translated into another language? Scroll to the end to read the Supporter in French or Spanish.
"Web Environment Integrity" is an all-out attack on the free Internet
From July 28
Using a free browser is now more important than ever. The so-called "Web Environment Integrity" (WEI) API, which is poised to restrict users via their browsers, is the worst stunt we've seen from Google in some time. Beginning its life as an innocuous, if worrying, policy document posted to Microsoft GitHub, Google has now fast-tracked its development into their Chromium browser. At its current rate of progress, WEI -- which basically amounts to Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) in the browser -- will be upon us in no time. Read why WEI is terrible, and why we must vocally oppose it now. Google's latest maneuver, if we don't act to stop it, threatens our freedom to explore the Internet with browsers of our choice.
From pro-democracy activists to minorities: Why people use Tor and encrypted chats
From July 27
Read the stories of people who are protecting their privacy with free software, why they choose freedom and privacy, and why we must continue to fight to protect our freedoms. Learn about a political activist who was harassed by her government for speaking up; how people in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China use the Tor network to access censored websites like Wikipedia; and how members of the queer community in Egypt, for example, are increasingly resorting to encrypted chats in order to keep their communication hidden from the prying eyes of the police.
The campaigns team and the community work together for free software
From July 25
This month, we published three new Working Together for Free Software profiles. While their voices may be those of just a small fraction of the community, we hope their outstanding dedication to the free software movement will inspire you. We hope that you'll share them with others, too, under the #WorkingTogether hashtag. Our first profile follows two developers, Adrien and Sébastien, from the Free Software Award-winning GNU Jami project, a free as in freedom solution for private videoconferencing. Next, we hear from fellow Free Software Award winner Protesilaos Stavrou on what motivates his work on GNU Emacs. We round out the updates to the Working Together profiles with an interview of Ali Miracle, a developer with the Uruk project. Each of these three new profiles comes with an accompanying article with complete responses to interview questions posed by our campaigns team.
The second round of FSF board candidate discussions started July 24
The FSF board has chosen a second round of candidates as part of its board process. All eligible associate members can participate in this discussion to get involved in the FSF's ongoing search for new board members. The second round candidates are Luis Guzmán, Maria Chiara Pievatolo, Markus Schmidt, and Jason Self. As documented in the board process, FSF associate members are invited to discussions considering these candidates in the nominee discussion forum. This discussion round opened on July 24 and is planned to close six weeks later. Participants must pledge to abide by the participation agreement.
Spring Bulletin: From privacy-respecting browser extensions to natural disaster relief
From July 13
The 2023 spring Free Software Foundation Bulletin is now online! Read about free software's role in the right to repair movement, privacy-oriented browser plugin JShelter, a freedom-enabled volunteer rescue response to an earthquake, an overview of licensing talks from this year's LibrePlanet, and a report from the FSF's tech team on how this year's hybrid LibrePlanet was broadcast live with free software.
This article gives a glimpse behind the scenes of recent work done by the FSF tech team. Read about Prometheus network security, completion of member data migration from an old system to a new system, system software upgrades, and other work done by the team to keep critical infrastructure running reliably every day.
Our copyright & licensing associate Craig Topham is continuously working together with free software developers, lawyers, and volunteers to assist the community with their licensing questions, finding hardware that respects your freedom, and keeping the public informed of interesting free software projects. In this article, Craig shares some of the accomplishments the Licensing and Compliance Lab achieved during the last six months.
RISC-V, a processor architecture under a free license, is improving at an increasingly rapid pace since its debut nearly a decade ago. The attention it is receiving by developers globally is encouraging to those of us who use free software and care about their privacy since it promises to empower us with a replacement for proprietary processor architectures such Intel and AMD, which give remote access to their manufacturers by design. This article also reports on the recent gains made to supporting free software generally on RISC-V processing architecture.
Software freedom & trademarks: Examining Rust's new policy through the lens of free software history
From July 27 by Denver Gingerich
This article, recently published by the Software Freedom Conservancy, examines the programming language Rust's new trademark policy through the lens of history. Other similar trademark policies in the past such as Java's, PHP's, and Mozilla's have had consequences for the free software community. Inform yourself about this relevant and important topic by examining these case studies, and use this knowledge to prepare yourself for the inevitable discussions ahead.
In these issues: What is GNU Emacs for beginners, displaying an analog clock and playing Tetris in GNU Emacs, editing Scalar Vector Graphic (SVG) files, many new MELPA packages, and more!
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, August 4 from 12:00 to 15:00 EDT (16:00 to 19:00 UTC). Details here:
LibrePlanet featured resource: LibrePlanet Pages that Need Work
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 the LibrePlanet Pages that Need Work page, which in itself needs some work! You are invited to add to this page, which is a list of pages from the LibrePlanet wiki that need work.
Also, please join our second ever LibrePlanet Wiki Edit Fest, happening Wednesday, August 23 from 12:30 to 14:00 EDT (16:30 to 18:00 UTC). Details here:
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 Adrien Bourmault and Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli as co-maintainers of the new package GNU Boot, a free boot firmware distribution for initializing your hardware and booting your operating system.
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.
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:
Jeffrey Bencteux (GNU Inetutils)
John Muhl (GNU Emacs)
Matheus Branco Borella (GDB)
Sergey Alexandrovich Bugaev (GCC, GDB, GNU C Library, GNU Hurd, GNU Mach, GNUstep)
Wang Diancheng (GNU Emacs)
Want to see your name on this list? Contribute to GNU and assign your copyright to 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:
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.
