• chess-6.2.4
• dico-2.4
• electric-9.07
• emms-4.2
• freeipmi-1.5.5
• gnudos-1.10
• ghostscript-9.14.1
• gnupg-2.1.16
• guile-ncurses-2.1
• gvpe-3.0
• kawa-2.2
• linux-libre-4.8.10-gnu
• mailutils-3.0
• octave-4.2.0
• parallel-20161122
• taler-0.2.0
• unifont-9.0.04

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 from https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/, or preferably one of its mirrors from https://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html. You can use the url https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.

This month, we welcome Mathieu Lirzin as the new maintainer of GNU Freetalk.

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 us at maintainers@gnu.org with any GNUish questions or suggestions for future installments.

Participate in supporting the FSD by adding new entries and updating existing ones. We will be on IRC in the #fsf channel on irc.freenode.org.

Tens of thousands of people visit directory.fsf.org each month to discover free software. Each entry in the FSD contains a wealth of useful information, from basic category and descriptions, dto providing detailed info about version control, IRC channels, documentation, and licensing info that has been carefully checked by FSF staff and trained volunteers.

While the FSD has been and continues to be a great resource to the world over the past decade, it has the potential of being a resource of even greater value. But it needs your help!

This week's theme is new beginnings. With new volunteers joining us from last weeks meeting, and the fact that we haven't had a meeting focused on adding new entries to the directory, it's time to focus a bit on the new. We'll of course be discussing ongoing projects as well, but this week we want to make sure the directory keeps growing even as we do the work on the infrastructure needed to make it better.

If you are eager to help and you can't wait or are simply unable to make it onto IRC on Friday, our participation guide will provide you with all the information you need to get started on helping the Directory today! There are also weekly FSD Meetings pages that everyone is welcome to contribute to before, during, and after each meeting.

GPG Sync is a recently launched project for managing the sharing of GPG keys, particularly within an organization. Micah Lee made the project internally at First Look Media and has now shared it with the world.

What inspired the creation of GPG Sync?

Since the very beginning of First Look Media we've taken computer security seriously, and that includes every single employee using encrypted email. But as an organization that has over 100 employees at this point, most of whom aren't already computer nerds, I quickly realized that managing keys is too complicated of a task for every single person to be required to do. I use GPG Sync to solve this problem: all of the complexity of key management can be managed by a small group of techies, allowing our growing user base to use encrypted email without having to think about the details nearly as often.

How will people use it?

At First Look Media, we've installed GPG Sync on everyone's workstations and just let it run in the background, ensuring that everyone will have everyone else's public keys without having to think about it. But I think a lot of other organizations will find it useful as well. I've spoken with people who work for other news organizations, as well as the non-profit world, who are excited about implementing it internally there. And I'm personally going to subscribe to multiple GPG Sync fingerprints lists, so I'll have trustworthy public keys available for a much larger group of people.

What features do you think really sets GPG Sync apart from similar software?

GPG Sync is really focused on the needs of organizations, while most other email encryption-related software is focused on the needs of individuals.

Why did you choose the GPLv3 as GPG Sync's license?

Whenever I decide I want to release some code, I like to default to GNU GPL so I can lock it open. I'm not opposed to using permissive licenses like BSD or MIT, but I only use them if I think there's a compelling reason for them.

How can users (technical or otherwise) help contribute to GPG Sync?

First, start using it! If you're part of an organization where everyone uses encrypted email -- even if it's just the other people in your Dungeons and Dragons party -- try setting up a fingerprints list and have everyone use it. See what you think, and report any bugs, or suggest features you'd like to see, in the issue tracker. And if you have programming skills, please take a look at the issue tracker and make some pull requests. I'm always happy to merge other people's code into the project.

What's the next big thing for GPG Sync?

I'm not sure yet, but probably I will focus on a port to other platforms.

Enjoy this interview? Check out our previous entry in this series, featuring Stefano Zacchiroli of Software Heritage.

As software permeates more and more aspects of society, the FSF must expand our work to protect and extend computer user freedom. We launched our yearly fundraiser with the goal of welcoming 500 new members and raising $450,000 before December 31st. Please support the work at the root of the free software movement: make a donation or – better yet – join us and become a member today.

For the past year, we have been very busy upgrading our server infrastructure, which we wrote about in the Fall FSF Bulletin. The new stack of machines works fully on free software all the way down through the BIOS, and makes use of redundant network attached storage over 10Gbps Ethernet. Cool stuff! We take care to prevent issues with freedom and privacy on our machines, which means avoiding the current x86 server CPUs that are encumbered with back doors as well as other components that require the user to load nonfree firmware. We use a high-end ASUS KGPE D-16 server motherboard, supported by Libreboot. Despite being a few years old – and thus supporting CPUs without known back doors – it is a beefy piece of gear, running up to 32 CPU cores, 256GB of RAM, and many terabytes of Solid State Disk storage.

Making the extra effort to build a uniquely free server stack does not come without some hiccups. Although the motherboards work fine on their own – we are already using them to run lists.gnu.org and Savannah services – they do have rough edges that need to be polished, for example, to get reliable Peripheral Component Interconnect support. The setup of the new stack and migration of our services will require a sustained effort from our three-person tech team during 2017, which cannot happen successfully without your support.

By hosting most of the GNU Project, we enable development on free software components that are key for the whole computer industry, such as Emacs, Bash, and the utilities at the base of all the GNU/Linux distributions powering supercomputers and the Internet's servers. Our public FTP server, ftp.gnu.org, serves 100Mb per second of free software all day, every day. That is more than a terabyte! On top of that, lists.gnu.org and lists.nongnu.org spool out about a half million emails between free software developers and users each day!

We are excited to have the opportunity to benefit the community by building, testing, and perfecting new hardware and technology that doesn't just work, but also supports our freedoms. Our ability to provide dependable servers for the FSF and GNU Project comes from your generosity and commitment. Your support funds hardware and the time of free software experts to work on deployments. We need you to give back and support this root infrastructure, enabling future free software development and distribution to thrive.

P.S.: If you have not already submitted, the LibrePlanet Call For Papers is closing tomorrow, November 30th, 10:00 EST (15:00 UTC)!