Free software is software that you can run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve as you please. While these freedoms are rights that belong to the individual, they are also intrinsically linked to the concept of community and sharing. It's imperative that we be permitted to use, examine, and alter software as we choose, but we also demand the right to share our improvements with the wider community.

Working Together for Free Software is one of our initiatives that focuses on the broader world of free software: the community, programs, and funding that we’re coalescing to mount the crucial resistance to the abuses of proprietary software. This is a category that covers a lot of people and a lot of work, and the Working Together for Free Software Fund is just one piece of the picture.

This fund enables important, mission-aligned free software projects to utilize the FSF’s nonprofit infrastructure to enhance their fundraising and other capabilities, without the labor and costs of becoming a 501(c)(3) nonprofit on their own. This gives them access to the organizational strengths of the FSF, plus additional capacity and unique benefits.

While all of the projects under the umbrella of the Working Together for Free Software Fund are absolutely worthy of your attention and donations, today we're highlighting just a few projects with some noteworthy announcements. Want to know if your free software project qualifies? Learn more here!

GNU Guix

Guix (pronounced "geeks") promises users and developers three primary qualities: freedom, dependability, and hackability. You can use it either as a package manager compatible with your current GNU/Linux distribution, or you can use it as your distribution. People are happily using Guix for software development, bioinformatics, high-performance computing, research, and more. The Guix project also encompasses the creation of Guix System, which is on our list of endorsed free GNU/Linux distributions.

Thanks to the contributions of nearly 300 volunteers over seven years, version 1.0 of the GNU Guix package manager was released in May 2019. Also, Guix has been helping to lead the way on reproducible builds, which provide large advantages for both security and user freedom -- you can read more about this topic and see videos from LibrePlanet 2018 here. Read about some more of the ways that people are using and modifying Guix here!

Help Guix flourish and grow: donate here

GNU Radio

What can you do with radio in 2019? When the radio software is freedom-respecting, you can do whatever you like! GNU Radio is a free software development toolkit that provides signal processing blocks to implement software radios.

Occasionally, the innovations possible with this system make news: most recently, this June, researchers used GNU Radio to increase the usefulness of the RF tags on rehabilitated orangutans released back into the wild in Borneo. To create a heatmap of orangutan positions, researcher Dirk Gorissen used GNU radio to make a digital signal processing algorithm. You can read more about Gorissen’s research here.

GNU Radio developers and fans have met for several conferences this year: GNU Radio Days in June 2019, and GRCon in September 2019, in Huntsville, Alabama. GNU Radio will also be a big part of the Software Defined Radio devroom at FOSDEM this year, which is currently welcoming submissions.

Turn up the volume on GNU Radio: donate here

SeaGL

As the hometown of the dreaded Amazon and Microsoft, Seattle may not seem like the best free software town – but sometimes the best place to organize is right on the doorsteps of our opposition. Since 2013, the free software community has gathered for the Seattle GNU/Linux Conference (SeaGL), a grassroots technical conference dedicated to spreading awareness and knowledge about the GNU/Linux community, free software, and freedom-respecting hardware. FSF staff are frequent participants in the SeaGL festivities, including former campaigns manager Molly de Blanc and current chief technology officer Ruben Rodriguez.

This year’s conference is at Seattle Central College on November 15-16, 2019, and as usual, the FSF will have a table. Come talk about free software with us, learn how you can contribute to the FSF and the GNU Project, and buy some GNU gear! We also are making plans for an FSF meetup during the conference, so stay tuned.

Help SeaGL stay aloft: donate here

GNU Octave

GNU Octave is a scientific programming language with built-in plotting and visualization tools; it's intended as an ethical replacement for the commonly-used MATLAB, which is nonfree. John W. Eaton began work on Octave all the way back in 1988, and is still the primary maintainer; we interviewed him about Octave back in 2012.

The latest version, GNU Octave 5.1.0, was released in March of 2019, and improves compatibility with MATLAB, among other improved functions.

Help GNU Octave scale up: donate here

The nomination period for the Free Software Foundation (FSF)'s annual Free Software Awards is drawing to a close on November 6th. If you haven't done so already, now's your last chance to honor the outstanding individuals and projects that have either furthered or made significant use of free software in their work toward a free society. This year, we're also recognizing newcomers in a special award category called the Award for Outstanding New Free Software Contributor. We look forward to the award ceremony at this year's LibrePlanet in March in the Boston area.

We value the community's input to identify the movement's most significant new contributors and projects. We rely on award nominations from free software users and activists around the world to help bring those deserving activists to the spotlight. It's been a joy for us to see the nominations that have already come in, and to learn about so many different people and projects in the free software movement. As with the movement itself, every voice matters, and our committee judges every submission we receive very carefully.

Besides the Award for Outstanding New Free Software Contributor, we're also encouraging the community to nominate the individuals that inspire them for the Award for the Advancement of Free Software. If you know a group that makes special use of free software in their campaigning for the good of society, please consider nominating them for the Award for Projects of Social Benefit.

• Submit your nomination for the Award for the Advancement of Free Software!
• Submit your nomination for the Award for Outstanding New Free Software Contributor!
• Submit your nomination for the Award for Projects of Social Benefit!

The deadline to submit your nominations is Wednesday, November 6th, 2019, at 14:59 UTC.

We hold the Free Software Awards as a way to invigorate all those in the free software movement. As free software users, developers, authors of documentation, and community organizers, we all depend on each other to achieve our vision of a world in which all computer users can do all of their work in complete freedom. Let's take a moment to show the people in our community who inspire us that we care, and nominate them today.

Now that the dust has settled and we have made our voices heard, we would like to give a sincere thanks to everyone who helped to make the International Day Against DRM (IDAD) 2019 possible. This is the thirteenth year that we have come together to voice our dissent against the unjust power of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), and we could not have done it without the help of digital rights activists from all over the world.

In our continued fight against DRM, we make it clear that we reject a world in which learning is shackled behind draconian restrictions. On IDAD 2019, we used our strength in numbers to tell Pearson that restricting access to textbooks is antithetical to the human right to education. Here in Boston, we protested outside the Pearson building, and spoke with a wide range of students and shoppers about the importance of their digital rights. Demonstrating our own commitment to a culture based on sharing rather than exclusion, we also worked in the FSF office, and remotely with collaborators from around the world, to make contributions to ethical and DRM-free educational materials.

The digital version of the dust jacket we made for this year's event is already available in six languages, with at least two more currently in the final stages of editing. It will remain freely available for you to print and share to spread the message of our resistance to media restriction. If you have a translation into your native language that you want to contribute, please write to us at campaigns@fsf.org.

With the help of our 15 participating organizations this year, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, APRIL, and Question Copyright, we proved once again that DRM is an issue that affects all owners of digital media, and is not just the concern of technologists. We would especially like to thank the FCK DRM campaign for highlighting our efforts in a newsletter that reaches more than eight million people worldwide, as well as No Starch Press, Leanpub, and Libreture for sales on DRM-free works that they held in conjunction with this year's IDAD.

Defective by Design continues its fight against DRM year-round, and there's still much more to be done. Just in the last week we have heard of the Disney+ streaming service's use of the highest level of Widevine DRM, and the forthcoming Google Stadia project is going to make a strong attempt at eliminating even the idea of digital game ownership. Here at Defective by Design, we are already brainstorming new ways to combat these attacks on our freedom, but to continue doing so we need your help.

To fight DRM, we need vigilant activists who will stand firm in defending the digital freedoms of those in their communities. We encourage any and all anti-DRM activists to join us as part of the Defective by Design email announce list, or to communicate with us in real-time in the #dbd channel of the Freenode Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network. Given the vast amount of resources corporations like Pearson, Disney, Netflix, Amazon, and Google have at their disposal, we are reliant on the community for donations to Defective by Design's mission to end DRM once and for all.

All of us at Defective by Design extend our heartfelt thanks and appreciation to everyone who participated this year, and we welcome all those who are just joining in on the fight.

Photo copyright: © 2019 Free Software Foundation, Inc., by Valessio Brito. This image is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.

• artanis-0.4
• aspell-0.60.8
• binutils-2.33.1
• gdb-9.1
• libmicrohttpd-0.9.68
• libredwg-0.9
• nano-4.5
• parallel-20191022
• parted-3.3
• screen-4.7.0
• src-highlite-3.1.8

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 Amin Bandali and Mike Gerwitz as new co-maintainers of GNUzilla.

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.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is happy to announce our office in Boston as the next official EmacsConf satellite! Join us on Saturday, November 2 for an all-day event on everyone's favorite self-documenting, customizable, and extensible editor: GNU Emacs! The FSF will join Zürich, Switzerland as the second physical satellite to EmacsConf, which will be held online this year.

Beginning at 9:00 a.m. EDT, we will be gathering at the FSF office to watch both remote and in-person talks on Emacs and Emacs Lisp. A light breakfast and dinner will be provided by the FSF, and three lucky attendees will come away with some official Emacs merchandise from the GNU Press.

A tentative schedule of the conference is as follows:

• 9:00 a.m. EDT: Conference begins with keynotes from Amin Bandali, Sacha Chua, and Emacs maintainer John Wiegley.
• 9:30 a.m. EDT: "User-related" conference track begins, with talks from Sachin Patil, Parham Doustdar, and Marcin Swieczkowski in addition to the lightning talks.
• 12:00 p.m. EDT: "Development" conference track begins, with talks from Jonathan Chu, Howard Abrams, Damien Cassou, and Matt Ray.
• 4:00 p.m. EDT: "Future" conference track begins, with talks from Greg Farough and Perry Metzger.
• 4:50 p.m. EDT: Closing remarks, with dinner provided by the FSF.

A small raffle will be conducted after the conclusion of each conference track, and Emacs stickers will be free for all attendees!

Although attendance is gratis, space is very limited, so please be sure to send an RSVP to campaigns@fsf.org as soon as possible to secure your spot.