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This autumn is a great time to visit the GNU Press Shop, the online store that promotes software freedom with every T-shirt, every button, and every two socks. We are always busy improving and expanding our selection of documentation, cool stickers, and garments as attractive as they are useful. There can be little doubt that every hacker, coder, and software freedom enthusiast you know devoutly wishes for a gift from the GNU Press Shop to help them upgrade their skills and spread the word about software freedom far, wide, and often. In case you haven't visited since last year, here's what's brand new in 2018:

• An updated 18th Edition of the perennially-popular GNU Emacs Manual: an invaluable reference to the many, many, many functions of the world's most useful text editor. Order it by itself, or as part of the "All Things Emacs" bundle!

• For a lighter read, we have returned to availability Free As In Freedom 2.0,the biography of Free Software Foundation (FSF) founder and president Richard M. Stallman (RMS), written by Sam Williams and annotated by RMS himself. At the FSF we always encourage you to study the source directly, and biography is no exception. Autographed copies of this book are available for dedicated free software enthusiasts!

• Looking for something with even more "aura" than an autographed book? New and improved glossy photos of RMS have been staged, shot, and printed by none other than FSF chief technology officer Ruben Rodriguez, and signed by RMS. I'll ship one to you carefully packed so it arrives pristine and ready to be framed.

• This is also a banner year if you enjoy software freedom and beverages. We have made available a limited number of mugs originally issued by the League for Programming Freedom, a fellow software freedom advocacy organization, in the year 1991. If a less venerable drinking vessel suits your needs, check out the new Emacs "Auto-Fill Mode" mug -- another constituent of the "All Things Emacs" bundle!

• Behold: A new gnu. We've printed one of our longest-running T-shirts in a new color: you can now wear the GNU Head shirt in Heather Mauve, a color we find flatters just about everyone. The remaining blue and grey shirts are the last of their kind -- get them before they're gone!

• 2018 was the year of the sticker at the GNU Press Shop: you can now order several of our iconic sticker designs by the fistful. The Emacs logo and "There Is No Cloud" designs have been hot items in 2018 -- and the Bash logo and vintage Emacs icon stickers are brand new. Stickers get seen: there's no more efficient way to raise awareness of software freedom.

That's what's new and exciting this fall at the GNU Press Shop. If you read this blog all the way through you are of course very eager to order all the items in it -- and you can! By becoming an FSF member, you support the mission of the FSF, help push free software to new frontiers, help us reach our goal of 400 new members by the end of the year, and of course 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.

Last but not least: if you need your GNU Press Shop orders to arrive on time for Christmas gift-giving, please place your order no later than December 20! For all GNU Press shop inquiries, email me at sales@fsf.org. This includes, but is not limited to, inquiries about shipping, sizing, inventory, past and future products, and anything else that's on your mind. Stay tuned for more excellent GNU Press products to come!

Hello everyone! My name is Hrishikesh Barman, and I am a third-year computer science undergraduate student. Growing up, I had an inclination towards computer networks, and in my first year at college I got started with programming properly. Eventually, I got introduced to free software, and it always gave me immense pleasure to be a small part of a bigger project by contributing to it. I realized that tech is made for the people (the society) and not the other way around, and users should have software freedom.

I came to know about the FSF through a documentary about Aaron Swartz. I greatly appreciated the FSF's ideas and was intrigued to be a part of it, so when I got the mail that I've been selected as a fall tech intern it was truly a great moment for me. The interview process was very smooth and friendly. I am being mentored by Ian, Andrew, and Ruben from the tech team. I am really psyched about the campaigns and the tech things happening at the FSF.

As a remote tech intern, I will be researching monitoring systems, alerting systems, and LibreJS. The main way of communication with the team so far is through IRC and emails. In my first week of the internship, and as an initial task, I was asked to write this blog post and start learning related technologies so as to draft my work plan.

The monitoring and alerting system project is about making fewer alerts for issues that aren't important, and more alerts for issues that are more important. The FSF runs over 100 virtual machines and a dozen servers. It will be very interesting and informative to learn about the current setup of Nagios and Munin at the FSF, and explore Prometheus. This will enable the tech team to have better insights into the software they run and the hardware it runs on.

GNU LibreJS is a browser add-on that blocks nonfree nontrivial JavaScript, while allowing JavaScript that is free or trivial. The first thing that I did was to make my personal blog LibreJS compatible. I am looking for issues that I can work on.

I am still learning how the FSF uses Nagios, but so far it is going well. The best part about interning at the FSF in my opinion is that it helps both ways, I learn and improve my skills and at the same time help the FSF achieve its goals. I'm looking forward to an amazing time and learning experience.

The free software community spans the entire world, with supporters in nearly every corner of the globe, busily coding, tinkering, and spreading the word about the growing importance of controlling our computing. The Internet provides us with many great tools to share the latest news and advances, but ultimately, there’s nothing quite like meeting in person at the LibrePlanet conference! At LibrePlanet, you can meet other developers, activists, policy experts, students, and more, to make connections and help us strategize the future of free software.

REGISTER FOR LIBREPLANET 2019 HERE

LibrePlanet 2019 is only four months away, on March 23-24, here in the Greater Boston area. We’re already in high gear here at the Free Software Foundation (FSF): we’ve secured four amazing keynote speakers, and we’re hard at work putting together an exciting schedule. Session topics will include:

• Free software activism;

• Practical and creative applications of free software;

• Case studies;

• Legal and compliance issues;

• Fighting surveillance and defending our privacy; and much more!

LibrePlanet 2019's theme is "Trailblazing Free Software." In 1983, the free software movement was born with the announcement of the GNU Project. FSF founder Richard Stallman saw the dangers of proprietary code from the beginning: when code was kept secret from users, they would be controlled by the technology they used, instead of vice versa. In contrast, free software emphasized a community-oriented philosophy of sharing code freely, enabling people to understand how the programs they used worked, to build off of each other's code, to pay it forward by sharing their own code, and to create useful software that treated users fairly.

LibrePlanet boasts three days of free software activities, starting with a Friday night party at the FSF office in Boston. Saturday and Sunday are packed with conference sessions, lectures, workshops, lightning talks, and a party. To attend LibrePlanet, simply register online. Registration is gratis for FSF members, and $90 for both days or $60 for one day for non-members.

See you in March!

My name is Lei Zhao, and I often stylize it as Leei Jaw. I am one of the fall interns for the FSF tech team.

I first became aware of free software in the sense of freedom at the age of 19. I encountered free software even earlier, but it took some time to appreciate the free/libre aspect of free software.

I'm working on making changes to GitLab to improve the license selection for new projects. As written in the article, For Clarity's Sake, Please Don't Say “Licensed under GNU GPL 2”!:

"When sites such as GitHub invite developers to choose “GPL 3” or “GPL 2” among other license options, and don't raise the issue of future versions, this leads thousands of developers to leave their code's licensing unclear. Asking those users to choose between “only” and “or later” would lead them to make their code's licensing clear. It also provides an opportunity to explain how the latter choice avoids future incompatibility."

GitLab has the same problem, but it is free software, so I'm working to change that. This is the first time I've participated in such a large project, and I am very excited.

I learned my first programming language, Pascal, in high school. Then Python, Java, C/C++, Scala, JavaScript, SQL, and Lisp. The language I've used most often is Python, since it is the language I used for my past jobs. My primary editor is Emacs.

In my spare time, I like listening to music, and playing the guitar. When I have spare money, I enjoy driving recreational go-karts.

Interested in interning for the Free Software Foundation? The application period for spring 2019 internships is open until December 23, 2018 -- see details here.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) tech team works every day to maintain and improve the infrastructure that supports hundreds of free software projects, along with the FSF itself and its mission to create a world where all software is free. Will you propel the free software movement to new frontiers by supporting the FSF? Our annual fundraiser is happening right now, and we want to welcome 400 new Associate Members before December 31st. You can join for as little as $10 per month ($5 per month for students) or make a donation. As a special bonus, all new and renewing Annual Associate Members ($120+) can choose to receive a set of enamel pins. Become a member or make a donation today.

The FSF tech team has been busy over the last year. Our small three-person band supports FSF and GNU infrastructure, and we work hard to improve the services we provide. All of this infrastructure runs on free software and is self-hosted: for example, we use CiviCRM to manage events, campaigns, mailing lists, and our database of members; our new member forum is powered by Discourse; and we used tools like HUBAngl and GNU MediaGoblin to stream, record, and publish 30+ hours of video from LibrePlanet 2018. Much of our infrastructure is routinely under an impressive load -- the Mailman list server we run for hundreds of free software projects continues to spool out nearly a half-million messages per day.

We don't do this work alone. We are fortunate to have both a worldwide community of volunteers and a thriving internship program. The six interns we mentored over the past year have inspired us with their work and dedication. Projects they worked on include:

• A free software replacement for PayPal's nonfree JavaScript, which can be run from the command line;
• A physical system for remotely resetting unresponsive servers with freedom-respecting software;
• Upgrades and improvements to the Free Software Directory;
• The replacement of the GNU Image Manipulation Program's old JPEG codec with a well-maintained library;
• Researching site monitoring systems like Prometheus;
• Testing Pagure, a code collaboration platform; and
• Researching the code used for license selection in GitLab, to facilitate future patches.

Two of our interns came to us from Outreachy, which connects under-represented people with paid internships working on free software projects. In addition to completing the above specific projects, our interns are now better prepared to take on future challenges within free software. We're proud that we helped them deepen their involvement in the movement.

We rely on volunteers to provide and maintain services to support thousands of free software developers around the world. An important part of what we do as staff is make sure those volunteers have what they need. Volunteers continue to maintain Savannah, which hosts both GNU and non-GNU code, and to take care of https://www.gnu.org and its translations.

In addition to supporting free software development and advocacy by others, the team also directly funds some upstream contributions. We are not just users of free software -- we also submit patches and bug reports to the projects we rely on. When we have the resources, we fund extra development in areas that are particularly important for user freedom. This year, we contracted with the author of the popular browser extension NoScript to do major improvements on GNU LibreJS, giving a significant boost to the campaign for protecting users against proprietary JavaScript.

We also use our position as technical representatives of an established institution in the world of free software to attract new kinds of resources to the movement. Currently, we are working with students at the UC Berkeley Blueprint program to develop software which will enable people around the world to more easily support the free software movement both financially and with their activist energy.

We've done a lot this year, but there are also many projects we didn't get to, and new projects that we want to take on in 2019. We want to spend more time directly supporting and improving the GNU Project infrastructure beyond the maintenance of the services we host. We would like to provide better options for developers who want to host their projects with organizations that share their commitment to free software principles; we want to be offering a more attractive public online presence for the FSF itself; and we need to show that a nonprofit can be best-in-class in its operations and at its mission without giving up its freedom to Service as a Software Substitute or proprietary software.

Thanks to the generous donations we've received this past year, we are building our capacity to take on these challenges. Ruben Rodriguez, formerly a senior systems administrator, has taken on a new role as our chief technology officer. Ruben's new role affords him time each week to continue contributing to Trisquel, a fully free GNU/Linux operating system. Andrew Engelbrecht, previously our Web developer, has joined Ian Kelling as a senior systems administrator, which means we're currently hiring for a Web developer. We're excited to be growing from a trio to a quartet, but we also know we could keep a whole orchestra productively busy.

In order to continue our work and push free software to new frontiers, the FSF tech team needs your help. Much like free software itself, the FSF is only as strong as the communities of users and contributors that support it. I encourage you to do what you can to give us the boost we need to start 2019 strong.

Yours in freedom,

Andrew Engelbrecht, Senior Systems Administrator,
and the Free Software Foundation Tech Team