To nominate an individual for the Award for the Advancement of Free Software or a project for the Award for Projects of Social Benefit, send your nomination along with a description of the project or individual to award-nominations@gnu.org.

What are you waiting for? Take a few minutes to give a little something to people and projects that have inspired you. Your nominations will be reviewed by our awards committee and the winners will be announced at LibrePlanet 2015.

Award for the Advancement of Free Software

The Free Software Foundation Award for the Advancement of Free Software is presented to an individual who has made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software, through activities that accord with the spirit of free software.

Individuals who describe their projects as "open" instead of "free" are eligible nonetheless, provided the software is in fact free/libre.

Award for Projects of Social Benefit

The Award for Projects of Social Benefit is presented to the project or team responsible for applying free software, or the ideas of the free software movement, in a project that intentionally and significantly benefits society in other aspects of life.

We look to recognize projects or teams that encourage people to cooperate in freedom to accomplish social tasks. A long-term commitment to one's project (or the potential for a long-term commitment) is crucial to this end.

This award stresses the use of free software in the service of humanity. We have deliberately chosen this broad criterion so that many different areas of activity can be considered. However, one area that is not included is that of free software itself. Projects with a primary goal of promoting or advancing free software are not eligible for this award (we honor individuals working on those projects with our annual Award for the Advancement of Free Software).

We will consider any project or team that uses free software or its philosophy to address a goal important to society. To qualify, a project must use free software, produce free documentation, or use the idea of free software as defined in the Free Software Definition. Projects that promote or depend on the use of non-free software are not eligible for this award. Commercial projects are not excluded, but commercial success is not our scale for judging projects.

Eligibility

In the case of both awards, previous winners are not eligible for nomination, but renomination of other previous nominees is encouraged. Only individuals are eligible for nomination for the Advancement of Free Software Award (not projects), and only projects can be nominated for the Social Benefit Award (not individuals). For a list of previous winners, please visit https://www.fsf.org/awards.

Current FSF staff and board members, as well as award committee members, are not eligible.

The tentative award committee members are: Marina Zhurakhinskaya, Matthew Garrett, Rob Savoye, Wietse Venema, Richard Stallman, Suresh Ramasubramanian, Vernor Vinge, Hong Feng, Fernanda G. Weiden, Harald Welte, Vernor Vinge, Jonas Oberg, and Yukihiro Matsumoto.

Instructions

After reviewing the eligibility rules above, please send your nominations to award-nominations@gnu.org, on or before Sunday, November 16th, 2014 at 23:59 UTC. Please submit nominations in the following format:

• In the email message subject line, either put the name of the person you are nominating for the Award for Advancement of Free Software, or put the name of the project for the Award for Projects of Social Benefit.

• Please include, in the body of your message, an explanation (forty lines or less) of the work done and why you think it is especially important to the advancement of software freedom or how it benefits society, respectively.

• Please state, in the body of your message, where to find the materials (e.g., software, manuals, or writing) which your nomination is based on.

Attend the Free Software Awards at LibrePlanet 2015

Want to be in the room when the winners are announced? Register today for the LibrePlanet conference, March 21-22 2015, in Cambridge, MA. In addition to rubbing elbows with the award winners, you'll have a blast at the rest of the conference, with a program chock full of sessions free software enthusiasts will love. Remember: Free Software Foundation members attend LibrePlanet gratis!

Presentation videos from GNU Tools Cauldron 2014 have now been posted online. The conference, which this year was held from July 18 - 20, 2014 in Cambridge, England at the University of Cambridge, featured nearly thirty presentations on tools in the GNU toolchain including GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection, and GDB, the GNU Project Debugger. Developers shared tutorials and insights in addition to discussing development plans for various projects within the GNU toolchain.

In addition to the presentation videos, which you can download and view with free software tools instead of using YouTube, you can find presentation abstracts and notes from the conference on the GCC Wiki.

Happy hacking!

• autoconf-archive-2014.10.15
• ccaudio2-2.1.4
• ccscript-5.0.3
• ddrescue-1.19
• dfarc-3.12
• emacs-24.4
• freedink-108.4
• gettext-0.19.3
• gnuhealth-2.6.4
• gss-1.0.3
• guile-ncurses-1.5
• help2man-1.46.4
• icecat-31.2.0
• libcdio-0.93
• libcdio-paranoia-10.2+0.93+1
• libmicrohttpd-0.9.38
• librejs-6.0.3
• make-4.1
• ocrad-0.24
• parallel-20141022
• pspp-0.8.4
• sipwitch-1.9.3
• ucommon-6.2.0
• unifont-7.0.06
• vera-1.22

To get announcements of most new GNU releases, subscribe to the info-gnu mailing list: http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu. Nearly all GNU software is available from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/, or preferably one of its mirrors (http://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html). You can use the url http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.

This month, we welcome Cole Johnson as the new maintainer of GNU Solfege, and Eric Blake as a new co-maintainer of GNU gperf (in addition to his many other GNU contributions).

A number of GNU packages, as well as the GNU operating system as a whole, are looking for maintainers and other assistance: please see http://www.gnu.org/server/takeaction.html#unmaint if you'd like to help. The general page on how to help GNU is at http://www.gnu.org/help/help.html. To submit new packages to the GNU operating system, see http://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html.

As always, please feel free to write to me, karl@gnu.org, with any GNUish questions or suggestions for future installments.

In today's Friday Free Software Directory (FSD) IRC Meeting -- which was the both the Halloween Edition as well as the 10th Anniversary of the Software Freedom Law Center Celebration Edition -- we approved updates to several entries; we added a new category, UI Toolkit; and we added a few new entries, including:

• Notepadqq, a source code editor, licensed under the terms of GNU GPLv3.

There was also a lot of very interesting and exciting things I could share with you about this meeting, but it is getting late and I need to get started on my Trick-or-Treating!

However, if you join us next week, you can join in our discussions directly while helping to improve the Free Software Directory every Friday! Find out how to attend the Friday Free Software Directory IRC Meetings by checking our blog or by subscribing to the RSS feed.

Join the FSF and friends on Friday, October 31, from 2pm to 5pm EDT (18:00 to 21:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory by adding new entries and updating existing ones. We will be on IRC in the #fsf channel on freenode.

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 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 Free Software Directory 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!

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!