• bison-3.2.2
• emms-5.1
• gnuhealth-3.4.0
• guile-cv-0.2.1
• icecat-60.3.0
• indent-2.2.11
• libextractor-1.8
• libmicrohttpd-0.9.60
• libredwg-0.6.2
• librejs-7.18.1
• mit-scheme-10.1.1
• mtools-4.0.21
• nano-3.2
• orgadoc-1.0
• parallel-20181122
• pspp-1.2.0
• swbis-1.13.1
• unrtf-0.21.10

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 Adam Bilbrough as the new maintainer of mcron.

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.

As the end-of-the-year gift-giving season approaches, we have a dilemma: how do we give the people in our lives the gifts they want without subjecting them to software that violates their user freedoms? So many new gadgets are loaded with digital gremlins that can take all of the fun out of the holidays, using proprietary software to sneak in surveillance, Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), and other malware in along with the functions we actually want these items to serve.

Every year, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) offers you an easy solution: our Ethical Tech Giving Guide! The Giving Guide is back with version 9, and loaded with tech you can feel good about giving your loved ones -- and it also highlights some dangerous devices that are better left on the shelf.

We create resources like the Ethical Tech Giving Guide because software freedom is necessary to our overall freedom. 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. 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.

2018 has been an exciting year for user freedom. There have been multiple new additions to our Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification program, with around 50 new products just waiting to be reviewed. Many of the products in the Giving Guide are RYF-certified, so you can give them knowing you're giving the most ethical technical toys you can. The Giving Guide has a huge assortment of digital gifts that will delight your family and friends, including:

• Digital media, including ebooks and movies;
  
• Laptops and tablets;
  
• 3D printers;
  
• Accessories to help keep your computer as free as you want it to be; and
  
• A list of nonprofit charities working hard for your digital rights.

When you're buying gifts this year, please remember that we're not just trying to protect ourselves from spyware, surveillance, and other threats brought on by proprietary software. This encroachment of our rights as users doesn't just affect us. It's not enough to choose to not buy a Google Home or Amazon Alexa for ourselves -- we need to help keep these proprietary technologies out of the homes of our families, friends, and loved ones. We can do this by educating them about threats and helping them to make better choices -- and to give you a hand, we've included talking points with each Giving Guide item to explain why the proprietary alternative is a bad buy.

Share the Guide with your friends and use it yourself! Host a Giving Guide Giveaway. You can tell your story about using the Guide on social media by tagging @fsf or using the hashtag #givefreely.

Happy holidays and happy hacking!

Hello software freedom supporters! I am Jake Glass, and I will be interning for both the campaigns and the licensing teams this fall/winter. I am a recent graduate of the University of Michigan, where I earned an engineering degree in computer science, and I am currently in the process of applying to law school.

During my summers as an undergraduate, I worked in software development, where I began to consider the ethical ramifications of computing. I realized that my peers and I were often unintentionally building tools to exert social and political control. As the Snowden leaks were emerging around this time, it became clear to me that the pervasiveness of these tools is an imminent threat to freedom worldwide. This was my original motivation in supporting the free software movement: how can we be sure the programs running on our own machines are not spying on us without having access to the source, as required by the Four Freedoms? My interest in these issues concerning copyrights, patents, and civil rights on the Internet has convinced me to attend law school, where I can engage in formal study of these topics.

The FSF's campaigns target important opportunities for free software adoption and development, empower people against specific threats to their freedom, and build communities around free software. My work with the campaigns team will focus on preparing written material for the Libreplanet 2019 conference and the 2019 fundraising season. On the licensing side, I will be assisting in the FSF Licensing & Compliance Lab, the preeminent resource of free licensing for free software developers for over 20 years. Specifically, I will be helping free software developers with their questions sent to licensing@gnu.org, along with creating some new licensing educational material for gnu.org and fsf.org. I like to quickly describe my internship as copywriting and copyrights! I’m excited to explore the legal and ethical questions concerning computing while building my writing and analytical skills through a organization contributing to global good.

Outside of internet and software freedom, my technology interests include machine learning, data science, and distributed systems. When I'm not working with tech, I enjoy cooking, hockey, biking, and card games.

For context, see the previous blog post, David's internship work on the Free Software Directory, part 2

One of the main projects of my internship has been importing information about free software extensions for Mozilla-based browsers on the Free Software Directory based on data from addons.mozilla.org. I call this project FreeAMO (AMO stands for addons.mozilla.org) and it exists as part of the directory package on Savannah. After many weeks of work, it generates usable directory entries. In the same project is a script to import entries from the Debian package repository. I also fixed bugs in that script, and got it to a usable state. However, before importing entries to the Directory, we want to solve one remaining issue: making it so we can import the data automatically on a regular basis, but also allow users to edit parts of the imported entry. I hope to complete this work sometime after my internship is done.

One of the issues I encountered when developing FreeAMO is that license names in the AMO package metadata are not the same as in the Directory. There is an effort to standardize license names called SPDX. I decided to take on the task of getting the Directory to adopt the latest SPDX license names. I created the Free Software Directory SPDX Group to coordinate this project. There are over 200 licenses and 16,000 packages on the Directory. Each package can have multiple licenses. I clearly needed to automate the renaming process. I used the Replace Text MediaWiki extension. After some trial and error and work to improve its performance, I finally renamed most of the licenses.

There are still packages with nonstandard license names that need to be evaluated one by one. One common issue is explained in the article For Clarity's Sake, Please Don't Say “Licensed under GNU GPL 2”! When people tell you a program is released “under GNU GPL version 2,” they are leaving the licensing of the program unclear. Is it released under GPL-2.0-only, or GPL-2.0-or-later? Can you merge the code with packages released under GPL-3.0-or-later?

Unfortunately, Mozilla is contributing to this problem because when someone uploads an addon package to addons.mozilla.org, they are asked to specify which license the package is under by selecting from a drop-down list of licenses. Then that name is displayed on addons.mozilla.org. However, the GPL license options are ambiguous and don't specify "only" and "or-later." To accurately specify the license, uploaders should choose "Custom License" and then mention the correct license in the description field. We hope Mozilla will change this, but since the Directory only lists free addons, and anyone can improve the Directory, we encourage people to use it instead of addons.mozilla.org.

I learned a great deal from my internship and from working with the FSF staff: Ian Kelling, Andrew Engelbrecht, and Donald Robertson. After taking some time off, I hope to continue contributing to the Directory.

We recently published a number of updates to our licensing materials. While we generally post individual announcements for these types of important changes, there were so many in such a short span that we needed to combine them all in one place. We recently added two licenses to our list of Various Licenses and Comments about Them, updated our article on License Compatibility and Relicensing, and added a new entry to the Frequently Asked Questions about the GNU Licenses. What follows is a brief rundown on those changes, and how you can learn more about free software licensing.

Commons Clause

We added the Commons Clause to our list of nonfree licenses. Not a stand-alone license in and of itself, it is meant to be added to an existing free license to prevent using the work commercially, rendering the work nonfree. It's particularly nasty given that the name, and the fact that it is attached to pre-existing free licenses, may make it seem as if the work is still free software.

If a previously existing project that was under a free license adds the Commons Clause, users should work to fork that program and continue using it under the free license. If it isn't worth forking, users should simply avoid the package. We are glad to see that in the case of Redis modules using the Commons Clause, people are stepping up to maintain free versions.

The Fraunhofer FDK AAC license

We recently added the Fraunhofer FDK AAC license to our list of licenses. This is a free license, incompatible with any version of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), but also contains a potential trap. While Fraunhofer provides a copyright license here, they explicitly decline to grant any patent license. In fact, they direct users to contact them to obtain a patent license. Users should act with caution in determining whether they feel comfortable using works under this license.

License Compatibility

In September, we added a new section to our article on License Compatibility and Relicensing, addressing combinations of code. This new section helps you to simplify the picture when dealing with a project that combines code under multiple compatible licenses. If complying with one license necessarily means compliance with the other, then you can reduce the question of complying with both in the following manner:

"[Y]ou start with a list of all the pertinent licenses. Then you can delete from the list any license which is subsumed by another in the list.

We say that license A subsumes license B when compliance with license A implies compliance with license B."

The updated section then goes on to list various examples of this in action. The list may be expanded in the future to cover more cases.

Translated Code

Finally, there is a new addition to our Frequently Asked Questions about the GNU Licenses, with an entry explaining what the GNU GPL says about translating code into another programming language. In short, since copyright law treats a translation as a modified version of a work, translating a program into another programming language has the same consequences as creating a modified version.

How to learn more

These updates touch upon quite a few different resources that we make available, but that's only the start of the materials we provide that can help you to understand free software licensing. For an overview of the resources available, visit us at https://www.fsf.org/licensing, or if you have questions, you can ask the Compliance Lab directly by emailing licensing@fsf.org. The Compliance Lab is our resource on free software licensing, providing materials and expertise to free software users and developers everywhere. Here's what you can do to help keep this vital program going strong:

• Help more users keep informed by asking them to sign up for the FSF licensing mailing list.
• Support our work financially by becoming and FSF Associate Member, or by making a donation .