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The work of dedicated contributors is at the center of free software's ability to empower users. Whether they're developers, documentation writers, community organizers, or inspiring new volunteers, everyone plays their own role in building the movement. Together, the work of these community members contributes to the technical excellence of free software, but more importantly, it makes it possible for everyday people to live a full digital life without compromising their freedom.

Each year, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) formally expresses our appreciation to these individuals and organizations through the Free Software Awards. These awards are given each year at LibrePlanet, our conference for free software community activists, domain experts, and people seeking their own solutions to problems like user-abusive antifeatures and bulk government surveillance. The Free Software Awards let these people and projects know that their work is deeply appreciated, and that they play a vital role in bringing this global movement toward its goals.

You might know of a contributor or organization who has done significant and user-empowering work on free software. We invite you to take a moment to show them (and tell us) that you care, by nominating them for an award in one of three categories: the Award for the Advancement of Free Software, the Award for Projects of Social Benefit, or the Award for Outstanding New Free Software Contributor. Don't assume that someone else will nominate them -- too often, everyone assuming someone else will express the appreciation means that it never happens. As taking initiative and speaking up for the community are important parts of free software, why not take the time yourself to make sure your voice is heard?

The deadline to submit your nominations is October 28th, 2020, at 15:00 UTC.

Award for the Advancement of Free Software

The FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software is presented annually to a single individual who has made a great contribution to the progress and advancement of free software, through activities that are in accord with the spirit of the community. Last year's award was accepted by Jim Meyering, whose work on GNU Coreutils and numerous other utilities was foundational in the early development of the GNU operating system, and helps to keep it robust. Previous winners include Deborah Nicholson, Karen Sandler, Alexandre Oliva, and Matthew Garrett.

Submit your nomination for this individual award here!

Award for Projects of Social Benefit

The FSF Award for Projects of Social Benefit is presented to an organization or team responsible for applying the principles of the free software movement to a project that intentionally and significantly benefits society in other aspects of life. Last year's award was accepted by Let's Encrypt, an HTTPS certificate authority that has made great strides in democratizing security on the Web. Previous winners of this award include OpenStreetMap, Public Lab, SecureDrop, GNU Health, Tor, and the Internet Archive.

Submit your nomination for this project/team award here!

Award for Outstanding New Free Software Contributor

The Award for Outstanding New Free Software Contributor is presented annually to an individual newcomer to the community who has demonstrated an outstanding dedication to software freedom. The award recipient must have made their first significant free software-related contributions in 2020, and show a pattern of ongoing activity. Their contributions may have included things like: empowering the community by organizing local meetups, software development, becoming involved in the strategic or logistical planning of a project, working on documentation, or helping to make improvements in the environment to attract and keep contributors. Last year's award was accepted by Clarissa Lima Borges, who upon beginning an internship through Outreachy, immediately hit the ground running on improving usability tests for GNOME desktop applications.

Submit your nomination for this individual award here!

In the face of threats to user freedom coming from every different angle -- including the ongoing pandemic -- let's press forward by showing the hardworking members of our movement that we deeply appreciate their dedication.

• bison-3.7.1
• emacs-27.1
• glibc-2.32
• gnuhealth-3.6.5
• gnunet-0.13.2
• libredwg-0.11
• linux-libre-5.8
• mailutils-3.10
• mcron-1.2.0
• mpc-1.2.0
• nano-5.2
• parallel-20200822
• pspp-1.4.0
• vera-1.24

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 Rayner Lucas, Tristan Miller, and Jason Evans as maintainers of GNU STUMP and WebSTUMP.

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.

Submit your session to LibrePlanet 2021: Empowering Users

Submissions are being accepted through Wednesday, October 28 at 12:00 Eastern Daylight Time (16:00 UTC). General registration, award nominations, exhibitor registration and sponsoring packages will open soon.

We invite activists, hackers, law professionals, artists, students, developers, young people, policymakers, tinkerers, newcomers to free software, and anyone looking for technology that aligns with their ideals, to submit a proposal for a session at LibrePlanet. Session proposals can focus on software development, copyleft, community, or other related issues.

Theme: Empowering Users

The theme for 2021 is Empowering Users. Over our thirty-five years of campaigning for freedom, the Free Software Foundation has seen countless people start to adopt free "as in freedom" software as a tool to affect meaningful change in their communities. When users have the freedom to study, change, share, and contribute to the software that they depend on, they are empowered to take charge of their own digital lives.

Right now, we are seeing people all over the world band together to show how technology can make us safer and keep us connected without compromising our freedoms. In education, we've reported on people hosting their own videoconferencing services to facilitate free remote learning, and have seen examples of educators teaching university classes with exclusively free software. From Italy to the US, parents, health care professionals, hackers, and tinkerers are getting together to facilitate access to much needed medical equipment to help combat the novel coronavirus. As discontent and distrust with technology conglomerates grows, we see calls for users to navigate away from Facebook's WhatsApp messaging service, and spikes in users on decentralized microblogging services.

LibrePlanet 2021: Empowering Users will be a celebration of such stories. Our work has been motivated by seeing people help others move away from proprietary tools that embrace corporate control and government bulk surveillance. Movements like this help build a future that empowers users and their communities rather than the harmful business models of monopolistic proprietary software companies.

What kind of sessions are we looking for?

• Examine free software through this year's theme, Empowering Users, through broader spheres of education, licensing, medicine, government, business, art, or social movements;

• Share an update on your free software project;

• Present strategies for strengthening the free software community;

• Explore current topics in free software licensing and copyleft, or give a great licensing tutorial;

• Host a workshop on how to use a free software tool, free software program, or free hardware project;

• Explore a free software concept or share your technical knowledge in an interactive session; or

• Lead a project "sprint" (a group work session).

All sessions will be reviewed by a community council representing a wide range of expertise. It's important to us to provide sessions that are friendly to newcomers, as well as those that help experienced hackers improve their technical skills. Whatever your experience level or the experience level of your audience, we want to include your session! If you're new to the community, or if you're looking for inspiration, check out this past year's conference site and session videos.

Will this be an in-person event?

This year has been an exceptional year for everyone, and the future is uncertain for in-person events. The FSF will continue to monitor public health notifications, and will follow the guidelines of the City of Boston, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the World Health Organization (WHO), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Whether we can safely hold the event in the Boston area and enjoy all the pleasures of meeting the community in person is not yet known. While the goal is to hold LibrePlanet 2021: Empowering Users in person in the Boston area, our conference planning will incorporate the possibility of an online conference. We know many of our attendees and speakers need to plan any travel well in advance; we will do our best to announce the decision on libreplanet.org/2021 and by email as soon as we responsibly can.

We will take the lessons we learned from our online experience this year with us and organize an event that is inclusive and allows people from all over the (libre)planet to participate. With this in mind, we ask everyone submitting a session to tell us if they can be physically present in Boston. Remote sessions will be reviewed with the intent of integrating quality sessions into the schedule. As always, if you will need help traveling to the event, the FSF is offering a limited amount of speaker scholarships, for which you can apply in the session proposal form. You can also donate to help others attend.

Office hours on IRC

We will be holding office hours on Internet Relay Chat (IRC). Those will be designated times where the LibrePlanet team, including experienced community volunteers, will be available to help potential speakers prepare their session proposals for the conference. Office hours are on Tuesdays, and start August 25 on the #libreplanet IRC channel on the Freenode network. They will continue every Tuesday until the Call for Sessions closes on October 28.

Times will be every Tuesday, starting August 25 until October 27, from 13:00 - 14:00 Eastern Daylight time (17:00 UTC).

You can always email us at campaigns@fsf.org with any questions as well.

Share the Call for Sessions with others

Help LibrePlanet grow far and wide by sharing this sample message on your favorite microblog. Feel free to adapt the text and use it with the #LibrePlanet hashtag and the included image.

@fsf announced LibrePlanet's 2021 theme is "Empowering Users." Do you have something to say about this subject, user freedom, free software, digital ethics, or technology? Share it at LibrePlanet 2021 by submitting your session proposal before October 28. https://my.fsf.org/lp-call-for-sessions

We're looking forward to seeing all of the engaging sessions come through. Please join us, and have your voice heard during vital conversations on free software's role in empowering users at LibrePlanet 2021.

Kind regards,

Zoë Kooyman
Program Manager

In the year 2020, every shred of good news is something to be grateful for, and the outpouring of support we've experienced during our spring fundraiser is very good news indeed. Over the course of the last month, not only did we exceed our goal of 200 new associate members, but we've gained more memberships this July than in any other July in the history of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) associate membership program. We are thrilled that in a time of many pressing concerns about freedom and safety, our supporters have grasped the central importance of the FSF's role in defending our right to control the software in our lives. We cannot possibly thank you enough for helping to ensure that we can continue leading this battle.

While the fight to free all software will always need financial support, it also requires advocacy to bring in more supporters at all levels of technological knowledge. We hope you'll use, enjoy, and share some of the newer tools and advocacy materials we've produced over the last few months:

• The University of Costumed Heroes video: An urgent software freedom issue right now, during the novel coronavirus pandemic, is the required use of proprietary remote education software (as well as in courtrooms and other environments where people would normally congregate in person). We've commissioned a fun animated video that illustrates why this trend is dangerous, and we encourage you to share it and use it to start the conversation.

• Petition for freedom in the classroom: Please join others in declaring in that we won't stand for the serious harm that proprietary software poses to students! Not only does signing communicate that you care, but you also have the option to specify if you're a student, teacher, parent, or administrator at a school that is forcing you to use proprietary software to learn or teach. If you choose to provide this information, we will contact your school administration on your behalf. Free software activists are already converting schools to free videoconferencing programs today, and we want to help make your school another success story if we can. Please read, sign, and share the petition today!

• The FSF Jitsi Meet instance: Finally, one of the easiest ways to introduce people to free software is to use it for something they were going to do already, like video chat! If you're an associate member of the FSF, and you're planning a video chat with a friend or family, member, it's as easy as opening a Jitsi Meet chat room and sharing the URL. I've personally used the FSF Jitsi Meet instance to convert my friends' team trivia game to free software videoconferencing, and it's another great way to start a conversation about why the people you care about should embrace the cause of free software.

Once again, we're so grateful and humbled by your support at a time when many nonprofit organizations are struggling to stay afloat. It's your conviction and commitment that make our work possible, and we hope that with your help, we'll keep the good news coming.

Screenshot from The University of Costumed Heroes by the Free Software Foundation Copyright © 2020 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

On July 29th, the CEOs of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon were called before the US Senate Judiciary Committee to give testimony to lawmakers considering substantial revisions to antitrust laws. Yet despite a five-hour hearing, conducted using some of the very same software which is at the root of these issues, little headway was made.

It's easy to focus, like these hearings, on the specific objectionable purposes for which the software these companies are involved with has been used. Specific actions have caused specific harms, and we understand the importance of talking about that and potentially taking or requiring remedial actions. However, it is imperative that we not stop there. We must go deeper, and expose the fact that it is the very way our predominant proprietary software culture and legal regimes operate -- giving software companies immense power over users -- which will inevitably lead to recurring specific problems until addressed.

Attempting to address the problem of monolithic corporations like the ones in question, and their control over the digital sphere, will fail without addressing the issue at the core of their exploitation of users: proprietary software, or software that does not respect its users' freedom. The terms of use and distribution for the software are by no means the only issue, but they are central to many of the issues causing public concern. We've been waiting for follow-up coverage to acknowledge the conspicuous absence of discussion about our rights as users to control the software we use, but it has not happened. This is evidence that the Free Software Foundation, the free software movement, and anyone else concerned with ending the dystopian control tech companies have achieved over our lives, have our work cut out for us.

Proprietary software is one of the chief ways in which these corporations are able to continually abuse their users. If the software were instead free to study, share, and modify, others would be able to detect and remove (or substantially mitigate) unwanted "features" like the user tracking frequently discussed throughout the hearing. Even users without technical know-how could then use the altered software to protect themselves, and would benefit tremendously from a robust community of software professionals and hobbyists able to verify that their computer or cell phone isn't violating their rights. Giving the community of users insight into and control over the tools that they use is crucial to retaining their freedom.

Besides enabling abusive features, nonfree software also helps these companies achieve and maintain their monopolistic dominance on the market. The Apple App Store uses Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) to ensure that only programs that Apple approves are able to run on Apple devices. This gives them tremendous control over the applications people get to download, and naturally tends toward a monopoly. As long as Apple uses DRM to ensure that their phones are only able to run software with their permission, Apple retains unilateral control over its users, and over an entire industry of developers, creatives, and tinkerers who develop applications for mobile phones. To make matters worse, the US and other governments actually subsidize this control via laws that make breaking it or sharing information about how to break it a criminal offense. The solution here isn't to tell Apple that it can't use its control in some specific ways, like banning apps that compete with Apple products, which is something it regularly does. The solution is to take this unjust control away from them and other companies that push DRM.

During the course of the hearing, subcommittee chairman David Cicilline continually referred to Google and the other firms up for discussion as "walled gardens." Proprietary software is the core reason for this term, yet in the hearing itself, there was no indication of the understanding that nonfree software establishes the conditions to trap users in the first place.

Likewise, nowhere in the hearing did we hear a reference to any free and easily deployable software that could challenge the monopolizing powers while giving users similar functionalities. Through network federation and decentralization, communities could deploy smaller servers that mesh together to form one larger network, avoiding the further "siloization" of the Internet. Decentralized social networks like Mastodon have already attracted millions to their platform. Even Google's dominance on Web queries could be challenged by deploying federated search software, such as YaCy. Twitter has publicly said that they are exploring such possibilities -- there is no reason all of the platform companies in this hearing shouldn't be doing the same.

The Free Software Foundation has been campaigning for complete software freedom for nearly thirty-five years, and is the organizational home of GNU, the first operating system written for the sole purpose of giving users their freedom. If we want to heed chairman Cicilline's warning and not "bow before the emperors of the online economy," we should start by letting our friends, families, and lawmakers know that as long as software is nonfree, we enable corporations like these to continue their assault on human dignity and user freedom.