Thank you for being part of our exceptionally generous community. Your interest in our mission is what got us where we are, in position to succeed if we keep at it. While it's incredible to have hundreds of thousands of subscribers around the world, we need to connect with millions if we're to realize a world free of proprietary software. This spring, we have set ourselves goals to reach 200 new members and 400 donations before July 15th, and to achieve them, we need your help. Please take this moment to publicly share your passion for free software. If each free software supporter inspires just one other, we can double our strength.

We tasked free software designer Raghavendra Kamath with creating some inspiring visual images to help us spread our message further. You can find these banners and profile images, including their embed codes, here. Sharing these images online might inspire someone to explore free software, and may give reasons for you to educate your friends and family about why free software matters. Use the hashtag #ISupportFreeSoftware when you share the images online or on your social media.

Here are some more ways to help grow our movement:

• If you can spare a monthly $10 ($5 for students), your contribution in the form of an Associate Membership is the strongest vote of confidence you can give us. For less than a subscription to a Digital Restrictions Management (DRM)-controlled streaming service, your membership will serve as a testament that our work is used, read, and making its way through the world. In appreciation, we offer Associate Members many benefits.

• Inspire someone you know to become an Associate Member, or gift a membership to a friend following the instructions in this link.

• Donate any amount suitable to your household, and have a look at other ways to donate to see if there is a simple action you can take to give your support to the FSF.

• Start a conversation about free software and why you support the FSF with someone you know.

• Share your victories and experiences with free software online or in person with your community. Please use the images provided and the hashtag #ISupportFreeSoftware to help stimulate other people to do the same.

Your generosity and outspokenness fuel our message and allow us to continue to advocate on your behalf. Our fourteen hardworking staff use your contributions wisely, earning yet another best possible rating of four stars from Charity Navigator this last year. You can read our financial statements and our annual reports online.

Individual financial contributions and spreading the word like this are forms of activism we need much more of if we're to overcome trillions of proprietary software dollars. We need to grow and diversify if we're to make respect for user freedom the default, rather than a constantly endangered niche. We've shown that with your support we can succeed together against far greater resources -- thank you for sticking with us and giving everything you can to bring about a brighter future.

Read more about our online appeal!

We recently added two new licenses to our list of Various Licenses and Comments about Them and we updated our comments on Creative Commons 0 (CC0). We cleaned up the Free Software Foundation (FSF) Licensing & Compliance Team page and refreshed the materials on it. What follows is a brief rundown on those changes, and how you can learn more about free software licensing.

Personal Public License Version 3a (PPL)

The PPL is a nonfree license based on the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPL). The PPL takes the language of the GPL, but redefines who is a licensee to exclude "Organizations." That means that non profits, governments, and other organizations are not able to enjoy the four freedoms in any software licensed under the PPL.

Free software does not discriminate based on who the user is, or how the user intends to use the software. The PPL falls into the same trap of those who would restrict military or "commercial" use of software. Such restrictions are antithetical to software freedom, so any license with such a term is necessarily a proprietary software license.

Anti-996 License

We added the Anti-996 License to the nonfree list. The "996" in the name refers to a common labor practice in China requiring workers to work from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm, six days a week. The license attempts to ban use of the software by organizations or users that fail to comply with local labor laws or international labor standards. Like the PPL, this restriction on who may use the software renders the license nonfree. Free software never limits the freedom to run the program.

CC0

CC0 is a public domain dedication. If for any reason such dedication is not possible, it has a fallback license meant to ensure virtually the same conditions. But CC0 explicitly does not grant a patent license, making it problematic for use on software. Our entry previously didn't cover this last aspect of the license. We've updated our comments to explain how the patent situation with CC0 works, and to warn users about the issues involved in using software available under the license.

Licensing team updates

As part of our spring cleaning, we made some updates to the overview of our available licensing materials. We welcomed some new team members over the past year, and finally have them included on the FSF Compliance Lab Team page. We made a number of other minor updates, as we're always looking to improve the resources we offer. But if we missed something, or if you would like to see more resources added, let us know by sending us an email at licensing@fsf.org. Here's what else you can do to help:

• Help your colleagues stay informed by letting them know about the FSF's licensing updates mailing list.

• Want to know more? Check out our previous licensing updates blogpost.

Thank you to all the FSF associate members and donors who make this important work possible.

• bison-3.4.1
• cssc-1.4.1
• emms-5.2
• gama-2.05
• gcc-9.1.0
• gdb-8.3
• gettext-0.20.1
• gnunet-0.11.4
• gnupg-2.2.16
• guix-1.0.1
• hyperbole-7.0.3
• libidn-2.2.0
• librejs-7.20.1
• mcron-1.1.2
• orgadoc-1.2
• parallel-20190522
• shepherd-0.6.1
• unifont-12.1.01

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 Wolf as co-maintainer of gengetopt.

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.

At the LibrePlanet 2019 conference, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) recorded 40 speaker sessions -- over 24 hours of video, and they are now online on our GNU MediaGoblin instance.

The FSF team put their heads together and selected a few of our favorites from the entire 2019 Libreplanet program for you to start with -- brought to you in a Digital Restrictions Management (DRM)-free, downloadable, free format.

• In their talk, entitled "Sharing global opportunities for new developers in the Wikipedia community," Srishti Sethi gave us some valuable insights into how you can get involved in the Wikipedia community.

• Amanda Sopkin's talk, "The secret battle of encryption algorithms," delved into the history of encryption, with lots of fun factoids about how encryption methods were invented, used and foiled.

• Martha Esperilla and Stefanía Acevedo joined us from Hackerspace Rancho Electrónico, sharing their work in building community around their work, including CoAA TV, an online audiovisual archive.

• In "GPL enforcement and customer benefits: Evidence from OpenWRT," Do Yoon Kim explained to us how his research shows that free software wireless routers are valued higher and sell better.

• Mary Kate Fain asked us "What free software can learn from successful social movements," and answered this question by sharing experiences as a grassroots organizer and as a free software activist.

• Free Software Award winners OpenStreetMap and Deb Nicholson both shared their work talking about "OpenStreetMap" mapping developments, and the free software community challenges we face in "Free software/utopia," respectively.

These are just a few of the interesting and varied subjects discussed at the LibrePlanet 2019 conference. Please have a look at the entire collection of 2019 videos and photos for hours of viewing pleasure. And if you really can't get enough, you can scroll down to the archives, where you can revisit the 2018 videos and photos, and much more.

All the LibrePlanet 2019 videos were created using free software, with high resolution USB Web cameras and USB audio mixing desks, whose drivers are supported by Trisquel. We want to thank everyone who participated in LibrePlanet 2019, plus our sponsor, Red Hat, and you too, for your continued support of free software, the FSF, and LibrePlanet.

We look forward to welcoming you again in 2020!

On May 2, the GNU Guix project announced the release of version 1.0 of the Guix software manager. Since the project’s beginnings a little more than seven years ago, nearly 300 volunteers from all over the world have contributed more than 50,000 improvements. Guix now provides a huge collection of bit-reproducible free software packages consisting of close to 10,000 applications and libraries from a wide range of categories, including gaming, music production, video editing, programming, and specialized scientific software.

What distinguishes Guix from other free software distributions is that it is designed with reproducibility in mind. It builds packages in controlled environments to ensure that the results are bit for bit the same no matter when or where packages are built. This means that users can easily deploy the very same software environment or even the very same operating system, at different points in time or on different machines. Reproducibility provides strong assurances that are of fundamental value for security, for the use of software in computational science, and for user freedom.

While Guix offers package management features such as transactional upgrades, safe roll-backs, and per-user profiles, package management is just one special case of its general facilities for reproducible, declarative software environment management. Guix bends the notion of a traditional package manager by extending these features to building systems: lightweight containers, Docker images, virtual machine images or bare-metal operating systems -- Guix specifies a flexible, programmable configuration framework for reproducible software deployment at every level. With Guix’s simple, well-documented extension to the general purpose language Scheme, users and developers alike can easily declare custom packages and package variants, compose and inspect arbitrarily complex software environments, and generate full operating systems with minimal effort -- Guix is designed to be hackable!

Whether you’re a software developer, a user, or a free software enthusiast, we hope GNU Guix will provide you with the tools to deploy and manage software with confidence and ease, qualities that are not usually associated with software deployment. The Guix community would love to hear from you!

The FSF supports the work of GNU Guix through its Working Together for Free Software fund. Make a contribution here!