Copyright c 2011 How to Contribute 51 Franklin Street, 5th Floor Boston, MA 02110-1301 Associate Membership: (617) 542-5942 Become an associate member of [email protected] the FSF. Members will receive www.fsf.org a bootable USB card and e-mail Issue 18 Bulletin June 2011 forwarding. To sign-up or get This bulletin was published by more information, visit member. the GNU Press (gnupress. fsf.org or write to membership@ Welcome to the org) and produced using only fsf.org. In this issue of free software – Inkscape, GIMP, Bulletin Markdown, and LATEX. Online: Use your credit card or the Bulletin... PayPal account to make a dona- by Matt Lee Remember, if you have any ideas, tion at donate.fsf.org or con- Welcome to the 1 Editor feedback or suggestions for things tact [email protected] for more Bulletin you’d like to see in future editions information on supporting the Why should I care 2 elcome to the first FSF Bulletin of the FSF Bulletin, we’d love to FSF. about that? Wof our 26th year. In this issue hear them! LibrePlanet 2011 4 we have insights on some of the excit- Jobs: List your job offers on our Recommending licenses 5 ing developments in free software, as jobs page. See fsf.org/jobs for The articles in this bulletin are for new projects well as articles reminding us of poten- details. individually licensed under the Thedangerofebooks 6 tial threats to our freedom and auton- Creative Commons Attribu- United Way: As a 501(c)(3) Spotlight: Merlin Cloud 8 omy. tion No Derivative Works tax-exempt organization, the GNUPressnews 10 We also have some changes at the 3.0 United States License. FSF is eligible to receive United Free Technology 10 Free Software Foundation. After ten To view a copy of this license, Way funds. See fsf.org/uw for Academy years with the Foundation, our former visit creativecommons.org/ more information. executive director Peter Brown has de- licenses/by-nd/3.0/us/ or cided to move on to new pastures — write to us at the address above. : handing over the reins to a familiar Browse and download from thou- face, John Sullivan. John has held sands of different free software a number of positions in the Founda- projects at directory.fsf.org. tion, most recently serving as opera- tions manager. He has returned to Volunteer: To learn more, visit Boston after his brief dalliance with fsf.org/volunteer. life on the West Coast. Josh Gay, who some of you may remember as a Image credits: GNU artwork by Free Software Supporter: campaigns manager from a few years Etienne Suvasa. Make sure you’re getting all the very latest news from the FSF at ago, has also returned to continue that fsf.org/fss. work. Finally, throughout this issue you LibrePlanet: Find local groups will see various pieces of GNU artwork. in your area or start your own at These were recently rescued from our libreplanet.org! decaying archive and scanned. Our thanks go to Etienne Suvasa for all of Come on in! his work over the years providing us with these glorious pieces of art.

12 1 example, should not come with restric- restrictions; and more specifically to such as public bodies, entertainment, tions that say you can’t use it to write contribute to the building of a critical embedded systems, mobile computing, Republican campaign materials. Be- mass in the use of free technologies. etc. The FTA courses cover these fields cause running a program on a com- form several points of view: technical, puter to do something one wants to • The Free Technology Academy economic, organizational, and legal. do is the minimal definition of what consists of an advanced virtual campus with course materials it means to use a computer at all, the For whom? importance of this freedom is easy to that are followed entirely online. FTA is for people who want to acquire explain. • The contents of the program are knowledge about these topics and ob- Likewise, Freedom 2, the freedom focused on free technologies and tain a certificate that is accepted at the to redistribute copies so you can help designed by e-learning experts. your neighbor, is straightforward. Like master level by the university partners. freedom 0, it is not hard for every- • The Free Technology Academy is However, holding a university degree is one who encounters computers to see specially oriented to IT profes- not required to enroll. Typical partic- how this freedom directly impacts their sionals, students, educations and pants are ICT professionals, educators, lives. When using a computer, it is decision makers. students, civil servants, and decision- prima facie beneficial and empower- makers from different countries. • All learning materials used in ing to be able to exchange with oth- the FTA are published under li- ers copies of programs that do useful censes that allow them to be Learning methodology things. freely used, modified and redis- So far, so good. But now we are All courses provided by the Free Tech- tributed. Learners who enroll left with the two freedoms for which nology Academy are conducted en- in the FTA receive tuition from access to the “source code” is a pre- tirely online at the FTA Virtual Cam- the partner universities’ teaching Why should I care about condition: Freedom 1, the freedom to pus. The FTA learning methodol- staff, and FTA credits are recog- study how the program works and to ogy allows learners to define their own that? nized by these universities. change it to make it do what you wish; study schedules: asynchronus commu- nication tools, few deadlines, and ac- by John Sullivan and Freedom 3, the freedom to subse- • The FTA aims to share the bur- tivities that can be joined at different Executive Director quently distribute copies of your mod- den and benefits of developing ified versions to others. and exploiting course modules dates and times. This model allows for The importance of these freedoms related to free technology. Or- anyone to follow FTA courses, regard- t the FSF, we have a goal of in- less of their location and job, as long Acreasing the size and strength of has always been difficult to explain to ganizations interested in joining people who aren’t familiar with how forces are welcome to strengthen as they have regular access to the In- the free software movement. To ex- ternet. pand the movement, we need to get programs are written. We lack an the Partner Network. the attention of people who have never equivalent of Schoolhouse Rock’s “How heard of free software before, and ex- a Bill Becomes a Law” showing how Why? plain why it’s important. We have to source code becomes a running pro- make the case for the four freedoms gram. Even if we had one, we couldn’t The use of free technologies is con- that characterize free software, and to expect everyone to be interested. sidered a key factor for sustainabil- succeed fully, we must be able to do Unfortunately, things on this front ity: Free standards guarantee interop- this for people who don’t care to know have recently taken a turn for the erability and provide a level playing more than they have to about comput- worse. As of this writing, the top re- field for developers; free software im- ers. sult when searching Google for “source plementations help to prevent the for- Freedom 0, the freedom to run the code” is not a definition talking about mation of monopolies that hinder free program for any purpose, is the eas- the human-readable language in which competition in the ICT sector. iest to explain. A word processor, for programs are written. It’s a Jake The presence of free technologies Gyllenhaal movie. I haven’t seen this is steadily growing in many sectors,

2 11 We use it internally to provision We’ve also introduced a new ad- movie, but I’m told that in it, the for everyone, and that’s okay. I believe new virtual machines within our pri- dition to the GNU menagerie, the “Source Code” is a government experi- we can also earn the support of people vate cloud. Merlin will then provision adorable and soft baby . We still ment revolving around a program that who can think of nothing they would these instances and even register them have our traditional stuffed gnu as well, enables one person to cross over into like to do less than learn or change how automatically in DNS. It makes the but for a limited time only. another’s identity in the last eight min- their computer works. rapid creation of large numbers of pro- Looking ahead, we expect to release utes of life. I’ve mostly gotten over In this effort, we are up against visioned virtual machines particularly a new edition of the GNU Emacs Man- the theory that this movie is in fact a powerful marketing machines like Ap- quick and easy, which I would say is ual soon, updated for Emacs 23.3. conspiracy designed to make our jobs ple, who spends millions of dollars to a general, if unwritten, expectation of As always, FSF associate members harder.1 tell us repeatedly that nobody should cloud computing. can get a discount of 20% off all pur- The prominence of Gyllenhaal’s want anything more than for their chases at shop.fsf.org. Source Code is just more buckshot for technology to just work, in the pro- naysayers who claim we will never be cess paradoxically defining freedom to able to convince people on a large scale mean the antithesis of both the de- that the freedom to modify a program sire and the ability to change anything is critical, because most people in their about one’s circumstances. This mar- lives will never want to modify a pro- keting strategy runs from their soft- gram. So why should they care? ware down to their physical devices, has been asked which are known for prohibiting sim- and has answered this question many ple things like changing the battery or times. In his answers, he highlights the installing a new storage card. importance of what amounts to liter- Of course people want their tech- acy. He says that, with access to source nology to work. But Apple’s trend- code, anyone can learn to be a pro- setting overemphasis on this idea has grammer and come to value this free- made them the Fox News of technol- dom; and it doesn’t take much work ogy. Just as Fox News rides on the to learn how to do a lot, even for peo- motto “Fair and Balanced,” heavy- ple who don’t ever intend on becoming handedly implying that viewers don’t master programmers. need any other news sources, so Ap- I can testify that his answer worked ple and its budding copycats ride on for me. What little I know about the idea that users don’t need real free- GNU Press news The new GNU Emacs manual design programming is self-taught from free dom, because they are already having by Donald Robertson III software, other than a couple high the best possible experience. Sales Administrator school classes in Pascal and BASIC. Free software certainly isn’t always But I know enough — most impor- best when it comes to functionality Free Technology Academy tantly enough about how to look up or ease of use, and in many places it he FSF is proud to announce answers for the things I don’t know — can learn from proprietary software. Tsome new merchandise available by Matt Lee that I can accomplish a great deal in But just as plenty of people who do at shop.fsf.org. We have two new Campaigns Manager my personal computing environment. not write news articles themselves still books out right now: Free as in Free- Even such minimal literacy is strongly support freedom of the press dom (2.0): Richard Stallman and the he Free Technology Academy pro- emancipatory; it is the surest way to so that others can write articles for Free Software Revolution and the sec- Tvides formal training at the uni- make sure that you are not a prisoner them to read, so plenty of people can ond edition of Free Software Free So- versity level about free software and of the software you use. But I also rec- come to recognize the ways in which ciety: Selected Essays of Richard M. standards. The FTA Consortium aims ognize that this appeal doesn’t work proprietary software company efforts Stallman. Signed copies are also avail- to contribute to a society that per- to crush the creativity and intelligence able through the store, but supplies are mits all users to study, participate and 1But if you have evidence, please contact of those who do want to modify source limited. build upon existing knowledge without me. code — of the non-Gyllenhaal variety

10 3 — end up hurting everyone who ever can mean Amazon AWS, which has more implemented than it is now. In needs to run a program to do any- many significant ethical concerns, but the future, Merlin will support spawn- thing. Like the news media in places it can also mean something like Euca- ing entire groups of machines, or en- with no free press, proprietary software lyptus/UEC (the GPLv3-licensed ver- tire self-contained systems, within the means gate-kept control over informa- sion), or other free software which pro- cloud. I would also like Merlin to be tion, tools, and knowledge, and that’s vides similar services. API-agnostic, and support a wide va- scary. Merlin allows you to quickly re- riety of cloud software. All that being “Fair and Balanced” exists in the quest the creation of new virtual ma- said, the software is available today, so context of the First Amendment. Like- chines and storage volumes, and can anyone who wants to hack on it can do wise, companies like Apple can ex- also assist in provisioning them (get- so. ist and offer their users streamlined ting them ready to do real work). It We’ve seen some rather gloomy- choice-free experiences serving media handles a lot of details in the back- looking options from big compa- certified by Steve Jobs, but they must ground (such as Puppet certificate nies who are talking up the cloud do so in a free world, eschewing the signing, BIND dynamic DNS updates, as the solution to all our prob- subsidized backing of government co- etc.) and aims to make day-to-day lems. What can Merlin do to ercion they currently enjoy in the form cloud operations as easy as a couple give people some flexibility with- of copyrights, patents, and Digital Re- of clicks. It also aims to provide a out requiring them to give up strictions Management. They can have free software option versus the propri- their control? their image, but they must not rely on etary software or closed web services Primarily, the real issue with the fundamental user freedom being illegal that are used to interface and interact pervasiveness of clouds with ethical is- in order to do so. with clouds today. sues for users is simply that they are Many people can and do value free- LibrePlanet 2011 What technologies are used to there, and they are the only real op- doms that they themselves do not exer- make Merlin work? tion unless you are looking very care- by Matt Lee cise, because they empathize with the As I said, Merlin is a Ruby on Rails fully. The average user isn’t yet aware Campaigns Manager importance of those freedoms to oth- project. I actually used the project of the traps and pitfalls involved in us- ers, and recognize that the alternative as an excuse to learn Ruby/Rails, as ing cloud services, and is very much is for their own, more dear freedoms In March we had our third Libre- I had only used Django or Zope in the attracted to the ease of use and sim- to someday be threatened (“First they Planet conference here in Boston. past. Underneath the hood, it uses Ac- plicity that the cloud promises — es- came for the...”). Many people also This year we wanted to run a smaller tiveMQ to pass messages between the pecially the idea of their files or data care about the way in which the things event, with the expectation that next front end and the back end, and of being available “everywhere.” Unfor- they use are produced, and they want year’s conference will be a larger affair course a whole basket of Ruby gems. tunately, this simplicity comes with a those methods to be ethical. When — our biggest conference to date. Merlin also assumes that you are using price — it is inherently linked to an inviting new voices to the free software Because we planned a smaller Puppet to provision your systems. expropriation of freedom and privacy movement, we can and should appeal event, we chose a smaller venue than What can developers who are which becomes harder and harder to to these empathies, but we don’t need in previous years. With only a sin- interested in Merlin do to help it reverse the more one relies on the cor- to depend on them. The character of gle track of talks, it was clear we succeed? porate clouds. the software available to any of us is de- could find a suitable lecture hall at Merlin, primarily, needs more at- To my knowledge, no one has at- pendent on the ethical environment in many of the universities and colleges tention. It works for me, in my envi- tempted to build a large, scalable free which that software is made. Whether in the Boston area. For us, Bunker ronment; it would be helpful if others software cloud that inherently respects programmers or not, we all need the Hill Community College proved ideal would try using it. It really needs bet- the freedom and privacy of its users. programs we use to be made and run for our needs. Minutes from the heart ter packaging and documentation: it I sincerely hope Merlin can be helpful in freedom. of downtown Boston and so close to isn’t as simple as installing it and click- in this regard, even if it is only to en- the subway system that it has its own ing a few things. It also needs quite a courage communities of users to build station, BHCC features prominently in bit of work on its UI, and I am hoping their own small private clouds instead the movie Good Will Hunting in the of- to get it to a beta release where a lot of always using the big companies. fice of Robin Williams’s character. of the basic functionality will be a bit How do you use Merlin?

4 9 • To design players so users can “Cloud computing,” unfortunately, The event kicked off with a wel- fered short but sweet insights into their send authors anonymous volun- is one of the most misunderstood terms come from our newly appointed execu- work on router hacking, Python ad- tary payments. in the recent history of computing. Lit- tive director John Sullivan, who listed vocacy, real-world accessibility for dis- erally, it has a million different defini- some of the things he’d like to achieve abled people, and free fonts. Ebooks need not attack our tions to a million different people. I now that he’s running the show: better The conference concluded with our freedom, but they will if compa- like to think of cloud computing sim- access to the people running the orga- annual Free Software Awards cere- nies get to decide. It’s up to us to ply as an abstraction: a system that nization and an increased focus on our mony. GNU maintainer and stop them. The fight has already provides methods for requesting and campaigns work. This was followed GNU veteran Rob Savoye received the started. utilizing computing resources without by a talk from Brett Smith about the Award for the Advancement of Free having to know anything about the un- work of the GPL Compliance Lab. The Software, while Andrew Lewman from derlying systems providing them. Compliance Lab is responsible for re- the Tor Project stepped up to take Primarily, cloud computing is solving license violations that involve home the Award for Projects of Social about (a) aggregating server, network, GNU software. Brett acts as the liai- Benefit. and storage resources into a seemingly son between the FSF and its attorneys contiguous system (“the cloud”), (b) at the Software Freedom Law Center providing some kind of interface for (SFLC) in New York City. the user to request or release these With the first two FSF talks out of resources, and (c) making these re- the way, it was time for an outside per- sources network or location agnostic, spective. This came from conference so that the resources are accessible regular M´air´ın Duffy, who works on from anywhere, even in the face of sys- the Fedora distribution of GNU/Linux. tem or network failures. Her talk Empowering Girl Scouts us- I agree that there are many eth- ing free software described a collab- ical considerations with “the cloud,” orative effort to teach groups of Girl See gnu.org/graphics/license-logos.html especially in its current invocation by Scouts and other young people in Mas- for more logos. larger corporations. However, their sachusetts how to use free creative soft- cloud need not be ours; it is becom- ware like GIMP and Inkscape. The ing more and more possible to use free children made a variety of creative Spotlight: Merlin Cloud software to build clouds that respect works, including t-shirts and posters, free software ethics and don’t require a which were later printed and put on by Matt Lee user to compromise on their freedoms display. Recommending licenses Campaigns Manager or privacy. After lunch, Richard Stallman gave For instance, one could imagine a his keynote speech. Unlike previous for new projects ustin Baugh is a former systems GNU cloud which only ran free soft- years, he did not announce a new by Brett Smith Jadministrator at the Free Software ware, and had strong privacy and philosophical essay, but instead offered License Compliance Engineer Foundation. Now he works deploying data protection safeguards, but pro- a warning about the dangers of cell large-scale clusters for major corpora- vided users the same type of experi- phone tracking and proprietary soft- e recently published a new page tions, and in his limited spare time ence they might expect from Amazon’s ware on mobile devices. There was Won our site, entitled “How to works on a new free software project EC2. This kind of vision is entirely positive news to report in this space: choose a license for your own work.”2 to help people deploy their own virtu- possible. the Replicant project has successfully It’s a comprehensive set of license rec- alization. Okay, so what’s Merlin? Give built a fully free, functional version of ommendations for new projects. It ex- First, let’s dispel this myth me the 30-second overview. .. the Android/Linux plains what factors are important to about cloud computing. What is Primarily, Merlin is a Ruby on for the HTC Dream phone. it, and why is it compatible with Rails application that I created as talks followed. Bob Call, 2gnu.org/licenses/ free software ethics? a way of interacting and controlling Jason Self, Asheesh Laroia, Mary- license-recommendations.html EC2 API-compatible clouds. This Anne Wolf, and Dave Crossland of-

8 5 consider when making licensing deci- established, mature license that users, • Amazon also requires the user to sions, and suggests specific licenses for developers, and distributors alike are accept a restrictive license on use different scenarios. all comfortable with. It also enjoys of the ebook. Publishing resources like this helps support from other free software li- the Compliance Lab achieve a couple censes: GPLv3 is compatible with it, • The format is secret, and only of different education goals. Most ob- and the forthcoming Mozilla Public Li- proprietary user-restricting soft- viously, it serves as a guide to help cense 2.0 should be as well. ware can read it at all. new projects make good licensing de- It’s unfortunate that the Apache • An ersatz “lending” is allowed for cisions. It also illustrates how the FSF License 2.0 isn’t compatible with older some books, for a limited time, uses licensing as a tool to encourage free software licenses like GPLv2. As but only by specifying by name the adoption and development of free we considered this change to our rec- another user of the same system. software. Sometimes people have the ommendations, this point was eas- mistaken impression that we care more ily the most important one weighing • No giving or selling is permitted. about a program’s license than free- against it. Fortunately, every major • To copy the ebook is impossible dom. They claim on Internet forums copyleft license has or will soon have due to Digital Restrictions Man- that the FSF wants everything to be Apache compatibility in their latest powered us are used to chain us in- agement in the reader and pro- GPLed. This page clears up that mis- versions, which mitigates those con- stead. hibited by the license, which is conception and puts the GPL in its cerns. Ultimately, we went ahead with With printed books: more restrictive than copyright proper context as a means to an end. this change because we want our rec- • You can buy one with cash, law. During the drafting process for this ommendations to help projects make anonymously, and then you own guide, we decided to make one ad- decisions that will serve them well for it. • Amazon can remotely delete the justment to our existing recommenda- a long time to come, rather than fo- ebook using a back door — It tions: in situations where a copyleft li- cusing too much on today’s immediate • You are not required to sign a li- used this back door in 2009 to cense is not appropriate, we now rec- circumstances. cense that restricts your use of it. delete thousands of copies of ommend the Apache License 2.0. This I hope our new guide and this ar- George Orwell’s 1984. shift was spurred on by several changes ticle help people understand how good • The format is known, and no pro- that have taken place over the past licensing decisions can go a long way to prietary technology is needed to Even one of these infringements few years. As sad as I am to admit help protect and promote free software. read the book. makes ebooks a step backward from it, patents remain a growing threat to If you have questions or feedback about printed books. We must reject ebooks • You can give, lend or sell the free software. Since the US Supreme any of this, please don’t hesitate to until they respect our freedom. book to another. Court’s decision in Bilski v. Kappos, write us at [email protected]; we’re The ebook companies say denying software patent litigation has contin- always happy to hear from our sup- • You can, physically, scan and our traditional freedoms is necessary to ued as before, and cases that have fol- porters. copy the book, and it’s some- continue to pay authors — the current lowed like Bedrock v. Google are clear times lawful under copyright. copyright system does a lousy job of attacks against free software. We will that; it is much better suited to sup- never be completely safe until software The danger of ebooks • Nobody has the power to destroy porting those companies. We can sup- patents are abolished, but any defenses your book. port authors better in other ways that by Richard Stallman we can implement today are worth- don’t require curtailing our freedom, President while. Contrast that with Amazon ebooks: and even legalize sharing. The Apache License 2.0 is the best Two methods I’ve suggested are: n an age where business dominates • Amazon requires users to iden- non-copyleft license that does what Iour governments and writes our laws, tify themselves to get an ebook. a copyright license can to mitigate • To distribute tax funds to au- threats from software patents, and every technological advance offers busi- thors based on the cube root of ness an opportunity to impose new re- • In some countries, Amazon says 3 the Apache Software Foundation de- each author’s popularity. strictions on the public. the user does not own the ebook. serves credit for their efforts in this 3 Technologies that could have em- stallman.org/articles/ space. The Apache License is a well- internet-sharing-license.en.html

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