The Free Software Foundation (FSF) supports the work of several important free software projects through fiscal sponsorship in a program we call Working Together for Free Software.

Donations to any of the Working Together for Free Software projects directly benefit the work that can be done. Too often, these projects are underfunded and developers are putting in a lot of personal time and effort to keep the project moving forward. Because of the FSF fiscal sponsorship, they can receive donations and apply for funding.

Our annual fundraiser is happening right now. If you're able to, please consider making a donation to Replicant through their dedicated sponsorship page. Every dollar you contribute helps this inspiring project work towards a freer mobile future.

Associate members are at the heart of our foundation and strengthen our ability to help other free software projects like Replicant. Join today to help us reach our goal of welcoming 600 new associate members before December 31st. As a special bonus, all new and renewing annual associate members ($120+) can choose to receive one of our exclusive year-end gifts. If you get a minimum of three people to mention you as a referral, you can get them too!

Below is an update from developer Denis "GNUtoo" Carikli, who is one of three people on the "steering committee" of Replicant: a fully free Android distribution running on several devices. It is a free software mobile operating system putting the emphasis on freedom, privacy, and security.

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Mobile devices such as phones and tablets are becoming an increasingly important part in our computing, hence they are particularly subject to freedom and security concerns. These devices aren't simply "phones" or "tablets." They are full computers with powerful hardware, running complete operating systems that allow for updates, software changes, and installable applications. This makes it feasible to run free software on them. Thus, it is possible to choose a device that runs a free bootloader and free mobile operating system -- Replicant -- as well as fully free apps for the user. You can read more about privacy and security on mobile phones and the solutions that Replicant offers, as well as learn some valuable lessons on how better to protect your freedom on mobile devices on the Replicant Web site.

Replicant is currently steered by a team of three people: Fil Bergamo, Joonas Kylmälä (Putti), and myself. At the beginning of this year, we successfully applied for funding from a program from the European Union called Next Generation Internet. We also received a sizeable donation from Handshake, which allowed us to make some significant investments.

The most notable changes we are working on are building a new version of Replicant based on Android 9, which will enable a wider range of users to use a fully free Android distribution for the first time. We are also reducing maintenance costs to increase sustainability. The Replicant project is now using the official linux kernel with very few patches, and we contribute patches upstream as well. This means we send our work back to the main developers of the kernel Linux so that everyone can benefit. This allows us to create a virtuous circle that makes Replicant benefit GNU/Linux and GNU/Linux development benefit from Replicant. Working with upstream would not be possible without funding, as it requires a lot more work than what we used to do with previous Replicant versions.

Getting people more acquainted with the work we do helps us source new contributors, as well as convince people to use Replicant. This year, we managed to travel to a few important conferences, as well as organize our own Replicant conference. A full report of the conference is available, along with slides, videos, and a summary of the discussions that took place. The conference allowed us to bring together the people who care about Replicant and who understand the importance of the work we do. Watching these presentations can help any new Replicant developers to contribute to the project, as they explain a lot about our architecture, our history, and how to begin making a version of Replicant for newer devices and Android versions.

Being awarded a large grant is a highly competitive process, which means we cannot rely on that for continuous funding to pay for all of our work, so we choose to spend money on tasks that have a long-term impact. For instance, this could include completing the library that communicates with the Samsung IPC modem protocol (libsamsung-ipc), which would enable other Android distributions to use it and share the changes they make with us. It could also help us to continue our work on free WiFi firmware. These investments will ensure that developers can continue to maintain Replicant even when larger donations are not available.

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Projects like Replicant rely on individual donations like yours to continue their work independent of large donations and funding. They can always use your help, whether that help is financial, or provided in time and effort. To further assist them, you can use Replicant and become part of the project's community by using its forums, contributing to its wiki, and submitting any bugs you discover.

While the satisfactions of software freedom are quite enjoyable on your own, some of the greatest joys of free software come from our opportunities to flock together with other members of our community: to collaborate on our work, teach new skills, or simply show off new achievements. A grassroots gathering like the Seattle GNU/Linux Conference (SeaGL) is fun because it’s so thoroughly participatory: everyone comes into the room with something they’re excited to tell you about, and they’re equally excited to hear what you’re working on. The people at the front of the room giving a keynote talk are just as likely to be sitting next to you in the next session, so you can tell them what you thought of their talk, and even find out how to participate in their projects!

As someone who is fairly new to the free software world and comparatively short on tech knowledge, I mostly attended talks on free software culture and more easily understood technological talks, although these were hardly the only topics on offer. Having unfortunately missed the opening keynotes by Lisha Sterling and Abigail Cabunoc Mayes due to some bad allergies, I began the day with a talk on DIY decentralization, by Aeva Black. Black set an irreverent tone for their talk with a reference to the notoriously goofy nineties movie Hackers, but quickly veered into much more serious territory: major digital communication platforms have exercised bias and even overt censorship against marginalized groups. How do we navigate around the power of Facebook, Twitter, Google, and the rest? Decentralization, federation, and self-hosting provide some good solutions, and a quick demonstration showed that if you have some basic know-how and tools, anyone can do it.

Next, I checked out Audrey Eschright’s talk called “Organizing your way to a long and healthy career.” Jumping off from the recent walkouts at companies including Facebook and Wayfair, as well as her own experiences trying to correct issues in past workplaces, Eschright laid out some of the basics of workplace organizing without a union. If nothing else, some of these strategies can be crucial for your sanity: as Eschright pointed out, just knowing “I’m not alone in what I want” can be a great relief.

My next talk was “Empowering new programmers through introductory Arduino workshops,” presented by Hailee Kennedy, a developer and co-organizer of the Django Girls PDX program, of Portland, Oregon. Kennedy has put a lot of time and thought into the best ways to introduce women and girls to programming in order to help diversify the computing world, and she spent a lot of the talk comparing various workshops she’s given in order to highlight best practices. The most important take-home message I got from this talk (and have continued to repeat to everyone since): actually learning a new skill takes practice, so nobody’s going to learn a skill they can immediately reuse from a one-day workshop. The goal of these courses, instead, is to pique the curiosity and confidence of the attendees – to give them an experience they’ll enjoy so that they’re eager to take on more programming projects on their own! So, an onerous experience that focuses on training and rote learning isn’t going to do the trick: instead, participants need a social, fun, and satisfying experience that they come out of having created something concrete, creating an itch to try more programming.

My final talk of the day was “Make it official: In praise of official programs for diversity and inclusion,” presented by 2018 Free Software Award winner Deb Nicholson. In this talk, Deb noted that a lot of the previous practices attempted by many companies to bump up diversity have failed simply because people don’t like them: trainings, for instance, can feel like a punishment. On the other hand, participants on both sides of mentoring programs like Outreachy absolutely love how these paid internships work – and they really do help interns get the tech jobs they’re aiming for! The FSF has hosted internships for several Outreachy participants so far, and I'm glad to hear that in our small way, we're helping to open doors.

I spent the rest of Friday at the FSF table in the exhibit hall, chatting with visitors and selling GNU Press gear, and then running our meetup at Herb & Bitter Public House, a few blocks away from the venue -- they completely merit the shout-out here, since they took wonderful care of us, and all of our guests seemed quite satisfied! We organize these informal meetups at most free software conferences that have staff attendees, to provide our supporters with opportunities to mingle, cross-pollinate their projects, and tell us how they feel about our current efforts. After all, our members and other supporters enable the FSF to exist, so we need to be available and accountable to you!

Day two of the conference started with keynotes by Benjamin Mako Hill (“How markets coopted free software’s most powerful weapon”) and Sage Sharp (“Countering impostor syndrome culture”). Mako’s talk began with data tracking the popularity of the Couchsurfing Web site versus Airbnb, and laid out a somewhat grim forecast for the future of free software: proprietary software companies borrowing techniques from commons-based peer production projects like free software are replacing, displacing, and outcompeting what's available in the commons. Mako delivered a similar talk at LibrePlanet 2018, which you can view on our MediaGoblin instance.

Sage Sharp’s keynote was particularly useful for me, as someone with limited technical know-how at a tech conference: their goal was to educate us all on how to avoid worsening everyone else’s impostor syndrome, since it’s likely that we’ve all got at least a little bit! My favorite take-home message from this talk: telling someone that their project, or their talk, or their artwork is “very good and you’re very talented” has a way of exacerbating people’s insecurities. You can avoid making them feel this way, however, by telling them, instead, how their work made you feel: as Sharp put it, “I can’t argue with your feelings.” Thus, when Sharp sat down next to me at the end of their talk, I told them, “I’m now going to use a skill you’ve just taught me: your talk made me feel very seen.”

My last stopoff before a long stint behind the FSF table was at Eva Monsen’s talk on “Learning natural language processing through the Regender Project.” This was one of those rare talks that had everyone in the room buzzing with excitement: the Regender Project is an open-ended experiment wherein Monsen is attempting to reverse (or neutralize) all gendered language in books that are available in the public domain, entirely through machine learning. You’d think this would be simple – just program your computer to change “he” to “she,” right? But at each stage of the project, Monsen found that she had to add more steps, and discovered more roadblocks, which she laid out as a fascinating narrative about how thoroughly gender is built into the English language (and, of course, many others). By the Q&A session at the end, hands were flying into the air with suggestions for other steps to try, and insights about gendered language, demonstrating the participatory and creative potential built into the world of free software, and how it opens so many possibilities to explore and reach a new understanding of personal and political realities.

After a few more hours selling T-shirts and talking free software at our table, I finished off the day with a talk that I knew would be too amusing to miss: “The Death Star Postmortem,” delivered by Gareth J. Greenaway. Every complicated project needs a postmortem, whether your project is a smashing success or a ludicrous failure like the fictional Death Star, which was destroyed not once but twice. Mostly maintaining a pretty impressive deadpan throughout, Greenaway started by explaining best practices for a postmortem on any project, with emphasis on how a properly done postmortem avoids placing blame, maintains team cohesion, and helps to avoid making the same errors twice. He then went into how Darth Vader, the Emperor, and the Galactic Empire proceeded to… make the same errors twice, and some new ones, besides. It was a very informative and entertaining finish to an excellent conference.

The FSF presence at SeaGL couldn't possible have done without the time, skills, generosity, and patience of our local volunteers, who did a masterful job setting up, running, and breaking down our table, selling GNU gear, and answering all the questions I couldn’t. I cannot possibly offer enough gratitude to Pean Lim, McCoy Smith, Jeff Silverman, and Mike (whose last name I didn't catch), all of whom were completely indispensable and deserve your applause. Along with countless other organizers, presenters, and free software supporters, they demonstrated to me that the power of our movement lies in our collective commitment to the cause, and our constant willingness to welcome and bring new people into the fold so that we can keep growing stronger every day. If everyone reading this is half as good as they were at making a relative newbie feel welcome, nothing can stop us in our mission to make all software free!

Finally: whether you live in the great Northwest or not, and whether you're inclined to attend grassroots free software conferences or not, you can help SeaGL keep soaring by donating to the FSF. SeaGL is one of the projects that's fiscally sponsored through our Working Together for Free Software Fund, so you can also contribute directly through their fiscal sponsorship page!

Photos by Dana Morgenstein Copyright © 2019 Free Software Foundation, Inc., licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Greetings from the GNU Press Shop! This is an update on what's new and exciting at the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) online store, your source for GNU apparel, programming manuals, and more. We know at this time of year you'll be looking for GNU gifts for your favorite free software enthusiasts, and we have some terrific new picks for you to choose from! For holiday gifting, shipped within the US, we recommend placing your order before December 17th.

For starters, we've got just the thing for the chilly season: we have replaced our extended selection of hooded sweatshirts with a single, user-friendly zip-up design. It still comes in our signature maroon color, but with an all-new "happy computer" graphic by the FSF's superstar 2019 intern Valessio Brito. Between this sweatshirt and the satisfying feeling of helping spread the word about software freedom, we think you'll be quite warm and cozy this winter.

But what to wear under the hoodie? As in past years, the autumn brings a fresh color variation of our GNU head T-shirt. This year's GNU is a snazzy maroon-on-mustard color scheme sure to make anyone who sees it hungry for freedom: the tangy condiment without which the sausage of computing lacks savor. You can also spill nonmetaphorical mustard on it, and nobody will notice.

In addition to the new GNU, we also introduced our Emacs logo T-shirt in a scintillating color combination of purple-on-green. These arrived at the shop in late June, and sold out faster than you can say "M-x apropos-variable RET case-fold-search RET." They are once again fully stocked, and yes, they will make you look a little like a super hero (kind of like a more customizable and self-documenting Green Lantern).

Still want more T-shirts? The LibrePlanet 2020 conference T-shirt is available to order now: they won't be printed until March, but we are accepting early orders for shipping or pick-up at the conference. The shirt is a very handsome muted aquamarine color, and features another excellent illustration by Valessio Brito.

Want something that's NOT a T-shirt? Customers who welcome the unexpected will be pleased to learn that a new version of the popular NeuG USB True Random Number Generator is now available. The NeuG has undergone an update to both its physical design and firmware, and provides higher-quality random numbers than ever before.

Your purchases support the mission of the FSF and help us empower the world through the use of free software. Associate members are the heart of our commitment to create a world where all software respects our freedom and dignity. By becoming an associate member, you'll help us reach our goal of 600 new members by the end of the year, and of course you receive a 20% discount at the GNU Press Shop. This means, for instance, if you are starting a free software manual book club and tea drinking society, the fifth member of your club can be outfitted with books and mug gratis.

I'm proud to say that I personally fill and ship every order from the shop, so if you have any queries regarding shipping, please send them my way. I also lead in selecting and designing new products, and I can tell you that we are more than happy to receive your suggestions and opinions about our merchandise. For any of this correspondence, simply reply to this email or write me at sales@fsf.org.

Thanks for reading this update! I hope that you find something in the GNU Press Shop for all the software freedom enthusiasts in your life, yourself included.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) tech team works everyday to maintain and improve the infrastructure that supports hundreds of free software projects, along with the FSF itself, in its mission to create a world where all software respects our freedom and dignity. Our associate members are the heart of this commitment, and we couldn't do it without your help.

Our annual fundraiser is happening right now. Will you encourage your friends and family to join today to help us reach our goal of welcoming 600 new associate members before December 31st, or to support us with a donation? As a special bonus, all new and renewing annual associate members ($120+) can choose to receive one of our exclusive year-end gifts. If you get a minimum of three people to mention you as a referral, you can get them too!

Below is a message from our chief technology officer, Ruben Rodriguez Perez, about the services provided by our tech team.

At the Free Software Foundation (FSF), we like to set big goals for ourselves, keeping a relatively small group of dedicated activists determined to cover a lot of ground in a short time.The FSF tech team, for example, has just four members -- two senior systems administrators, one Web developer, and a part-time chief technology officer -- yet we manage to run over 120 virtual servers. These run on about a dozen machines hosted at four different data centers. These include many public-facing Web sites and community services, as well as every single IT requirement for the staff: workstations, data storage and backup, networking, printing, accounting, telephony, email, you name it.

We don't outsource any of our daily software needs because we need to be sure that they are done using only free software. Remember, there is no "cloud," just other people's computers. For example: we don't outsource our email, so every day we send over half a million messages to thousands of free software hackers through the community mailing lists we host. We also don't outsource our Web storage or networking, so we serve tens of thousands of free software downloads -- over 1.5 terabytes of data -- a day. And our popularity, and the critical nature of the resources we make available, make us a target for denial of service attacks (one is ongoing as we write this), requiring constant monitoring by the tech team, whose members take turns being ready for emergency work so that the resources our supporters depend on stay available.

As hard as we work, we still want to do more, like increasing our already strict standards on hardware compliance, so in 2020, we will finish replacing the few remaining servers that require a non-free BIOS. To be compliant to our own high standards, we need to be working with devices that are available through Respects Your Freedom retailers. We plan to add new machines to our farm, so that we can host more community servers like the ones we already host for KDE, SugarLabs, GNU Guix, Replicant, gNewSense, GNU Linux-Libre, and FSFLA. We provide completely virtual machines that these projects use for their daily operations, whether that's Web hosting, mailing lists, software repositories, or compiling and testing software packages.

We know that many software projects and individual hackers are looking for more options on code hosting services that focus on freedom and privacy, so we are working to set up a public site that anybody can use to publish, collaborate, or document their progress on free software projects. We will follow strict criteria to ensure that this code repository hosts only fully free software, and that it follows the very best practices towards freedom and privacy.

Another project that we are very excited about for this year is a long-awaited refresh of https://www.fsf.org. Not only will it be restyled, but also easier to browse on mobile devices. As our campaigns and licensing teams are eager to create and publish more resources in different formats, we will also work to improve the support for publishing audio and video files in the site. And to enable you to do more, too, we are also developing a site to organize petitions and collect signatures, so that together we can run more effective grassroots campaigns and fight for the freedom of all computer users.

All of these efforts require countless hours of hard work, and the use of high quality hardware. These come to us at a significant cost, not just to purchase, but to keep running and to host at specialized data centers (if you have rack space in the Boston area, we are always looking for donors). For all this work, we depend on the continuous commitment of individual contributors to keep providing the technical foundation to fight for software freedom.

Photo by Michael McMahon Copyright © 2019 Free Software Foundation, Inc., licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

For many of us, the holiday season is about bringing our loved ones together to celebrate. Most of the time, this includes giving them a neatly wrapped present or two. We go through the buying process carefully, using a friend or family member's likes and dislikes to sift through the Web and find the right item. But when choosing a tech gift, we need to be careful to give them something that doesn't harm them instead.

This is why we at the Free Software Foundation (FSF) publish our Ethical Tech Giving Guide each year, as a way to help free software supporters choose gifts that won't burden the people they care about with proprietary software or venomous Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). Devices may come and go, but introducing another person to software freedom is the start of a lifelong journey.

We create resources like the Ethical Tech Giving Guide to let others know that true freedom is dependent on software freedom. Our annual fundraiser is happening right now, and we're looking to bring 600 new associate members into the fold before December 31st. Our membership program is the heart of our work here at the FSF, and we couldn't do it without community support. If you're not already one of our valued members, will you take the next step in your commitment to software freedom and become an associate member today? Beginning at the $120 level of contribution, new and renewing members can choose from a great array of fundraiser premiums, including FSF and GNU patches, an FSF-emblazoned thermos, an FSF backpack, or all at once! We also encourage you to share this Guide, and our message, with friends.

The Giving Guide is a tool that will help you avoid the temptation to get your loved ones the latest offerings from companies like Apple or Amazon, whose business model revolves around subjecting people to proprietary malware and surveillance. Digital personal assistants and other devices running proprietary software did not become the norm overnight. Rather, they achieved their popularity through convincing one person at a time that they were useful. Tech corporations have billions of marketing dollars to convince people to use their products -- but our movement has more and more people every day, who can make daily choices to refuse them, and deprive them of power.

Computing in the free world received a major gift of its own this year with our Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification of the Talos II and Talos II Lite, mainboards that are based on the promising POWER9 CPU architecture. The Talos mainboards and the POWER9 architecture are off to a great start where user freedoms are concerned, and may in time replace the more restrictive X86 motherboards that are popular today. It's a great start for the next phase of the RYF program, something we've taken into consideration when making major improvements to its Web site.

The Purism Librem 5 cell phone is another exciting addition to the Giving Guide this year: we're giving it a tentative recommendation because the company has publicly committed to doing the right things for prioritizing user freedom and privacy. We also have evaluated and endorsed the operating system that the Librem 5 will run, the fully free PureOS, and the phone is designed for maximum privacy, security, and user freedom.

We are still strong in our resistance, and Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, and company still haven't won the fight despite their efforts. The free software movement continues on, and the FSF is still here to fight for the freedom of computer users around the globe.

Share the Guide with your friends and family, and use it to give a few gifts yourself! Just like the free software movement, the FSF community is spread around the globe. Earlier this month we sent over 12,000 letters to supporters far and wide, and take our own holiday joy in seeing how far the fight for a free society has come since its humble beginnings. Although it's winter here in Boston, your sustained support, feedback, and positivity helps us keep the free software fires burning.