Mise à jour de la base de données, veuillez patienter...

For context, see the previous blog post, Introducing David Hedlund, intern with the FSF tech team.

I'm working on creating a list of free software extensions for Mozilla-based browsers on the Free Software Directory based on data from addons.mozilla.org. This is needed because the official extensions repository includes many proprietary extensions.

I found out that it's not possible to use the addons.mozilla.org API to list add-on collections, so I submitted a bug report for this. To my surprise they declined my suggestion, so I had to add a function to my program to parse it manually. Then I went on and wrote a detailed README file to describe the philosophy for the project to make it easy for anyone to contribute. I merged my source code to the Savannah GNU package called Free Software Directory, which also has scripts for importing data from Debian.

I started a collection of IceCat add-ons and recommended IceCat (and Abrowser) to use it in Tools -> Add-ons (about:addons) -> Get Add-ons.

During a Free Software Directory meeting, I started to work on my idea to set up an IRC bot to send automatic messages in our channel, #fsf. For example, "The Free Software Directory meeting starts now." Eggdrop is an old stable bot program, so I decided that we should use it. With some help from a great volunteer, I wrote an Eggdrop script and configuration script for the FSF along with some documentation.

I wrote a really simple script to figure out the WebExtension support status for IceCat add-ons on the Directory. Then I deleted all legacy add-ons for IceCat from the Directory with the edit summary: “Not a WebExtension so it's not compatible with IceCat 60 that will be released soon. We don't have resources to maintain legacy add-ons too.” Over 100 entries were deleted. Then I updated my program used to sync selected add-ons with the Directory, reducing my old legacy collection from 137 to 79. Some of them have functionality that is now part of Firefox. Finally I removed IceCat legacy add-ons from the Directory's unapproved revision list. I started a buggy entries page and fixed some entries.

There is an existing package to import data from Debian into the Directory, but it hasn't been maintained recently. I ran those scripts, but got stuck and submitted a bug.

Pywikibot is a Python library and collection of scripts that automate changes and analysis on MediaWiki sites. I ran into some problems running it on the Directory, but a developer in #pywikibot helped me out. I documented the complete instructions for using pywikibot to upload files in the Directory.

I feel like I'm making good progress and looking forward to getting automated edits working with Pywikibot or some other way so that Debian and addons.mozilla.org data can be synced with the directory.

No meeting will be taking place this week due to travel, but meetings will return to our regular schedule starting on Friday, July 27th.

Tens of thousands of people visit directory.fsf.org each month to discover free software. Each entry in the Directory contains a wealth of useful information, from basic category and descriptions, to providing detailed info about version control, IRC channels, documentation, and licensing info that has been carefully checked by FSF staff and trained volunteers.

When a user comes to the Directory, they know that everything in it is free software, has only free dependencies, and runs on a free OS. With over 16,000 entries, it is a massive repository of information about free software.

While the Directory has been and continues to be a great resource to the world for many years now, it has the potential to be a resource of even greater value. But it needs your help! And since it's a MediaWiki instance, it's easy for anyone to edit and contribute to the Directory.

If you are eager to help, and you can't wait until the next meeting, our participation guide will provide you with all the information you need to get started on helping the Directory today!

Howdy there, fellow cyber denizens; 'tis I, Alyssa Rosenzweig, your friendly local biological life form! I'm a certified goofball, licensed to be silly under the GPLv3, but more importantly, I'm passionate about free software's role in society. I'm excited to join the Free Software Foundation as an intern this summer to expand my understanding of our movement. Well, that, and purchasing my first propeller beanie in strict compliance with the FSF office dress code!

Anywho, I hail from a family of engineers and was introduced to programming at an early age. As a miniature humanoid, I discovered that practice let me hit buttons on a keyboard and have my textual protagonist dance on my terminal -- that was cool! Mimicking those around me, I hacked with an Apple laptop, running macOS, compiling in Xcode, and talking on Skype. I was vaguely aware of the free software ethos, so sometimes I liberated my code. Sometimes I did not. I was little more than a button masher with a flashing TTY; I wrote video games while inside a video game, my life firewalled from reality.

I grew up. Offline, I learned in school about politics, civics, history. My fascination grew from PHP and C++ to Dr. King, Mahatma Gandhi, Cesar Chavez: real people, making real change, in the real world. Online, I added Richard Stallman to my nascent list of heroes. Discovering the free software movement transformed me. Soon, armed with both programming and politics, I watched the genie fly out of the bottle, granting me three wishes. I chose liberty, equality, and fraternity – Vive la philosophie! Yet I was restless. I was still. How could I? People lived. People died. Programs booted. Programs -9'd. The world spun. I sat. How could I? How could I? I put 10 and 10 together, and soon I knew my mission: to program for freedom, to write free software. Voracious, I read code and prose, and focused, I hacked and hacked. Today, this path has led to me to copyleft my blog on free software, to condemn proprietary software at every turn, and most of all, to code, to collaborate, to contribute.

Critically, I have developed a focus on low-level freedom. I joined Libreboot, a free boot firmware, and through that immersion in boot freedom, I learned of two grave new threats: the Intel Management Engine and the AMD Platform Security Processor. It became clear that Intel and AMD's x86, the dominant architecture among free and proprietary software users alike, no longer belonged in our movement. I switched to ARM machines.

Unfortunately, free software support for ARM is lacking. On popular almost-free chipsets like the RK3288, the graphics processor requires proprietary blobs. Thus, we hackers are creating Panfrost, a free driver for modern ARM Mali chips. Today, on an RK3288 laptop, Panfrost is mature enough to run the famous benchmark, es2gears, with zero lines of proprietary code. But even with projects like Panfrost, intense ARM fragmentation has made the architectural jump a RISCy proposition for free software supporters. Indeed, there is not yet a user-friendly, fully free GNU/Linux distribution available for ARM.

This summer with the FSF, I am working to address these issues. My immediate focus is contributing to ARM-related resources like the LibrePlanet wiki and the FSF website. Longer-term, I seek to improve distribution support to enable x86-bound users to make the switch. No one -- and no zero -- has claimed the road ahead is easy. But little by little, together we can chip away at the proprietary monopoly, in the name of freer chips.

As a part of my project to make the Free Software Directory mobile friendly, I can add extensions, modify the code, and format the pages the way I like. I have complete freedom to experiment on their development site as much as I want. It's wonderful to be able to work on something I really enjoy under the guidance of experienced mentors.

What is the Free Software Directory?

The Free Software Directory is a project of the Free Software Foundation that catalogs free software and allows people to download free software with verified free licenses. In 2011, it was re-launched as a wiki, using MediaWiki and Semantic MediaWiki to give users greater freedom to add, use or modify its textual data.

My work:

After setting up Trisquel (a fully free operating system and GNU/Linux distribution) on my machine and getting access to the development server, I was good to go by the second day of my internship. I had already done a lot of research, so I knew what I was going for.

MediaWiki offers a simple way to make any wiki mobile-optimized. The extension MobileFrontend provides various site transformations that make your wiki mobile-friendly. It comes with useful features like a mobile menu and section collapsing, and has a very simple reader-oriented interface. It can be installed very easily. People with less experience don't need to spend time learning how to understand complex code. The CSS of the mobile theme can also be edited to achieve desired customizations using MediaWiki:Mobile.css (which is a Web page on your wiki, a counterpart of MediaWiki:Common.css). In short, MobileFrontend can give a very effective mobile-optimized view without much hassle. (For more information, see the project page.)

I installed MobileFrontend from the MediaWiki extension distributor and extracted the files locally. Then I uploaded them to the extensions directory in the root, i.e. /var/www/w/extensions.

Next, I had to edit LocalSettings.php. I used Vim for that. Vim is a very efficient and simple text editor. I was going to use Vim for the first time, so I spent some time before that going through Vimtutor.

After ensuring that the extension was installed properly, I couldn't wait to see how the site looked on mobile. I opened its mobile view on my desktop, and that was when I realized that while MobileFrontend is able to make most of the pages mobile optimized, it doesn't necessarily make it "mobile friendly." I checked the development site for various bugs and text which was not properly aligned.

Issues I faced:

1. The HeaderTabs extension is incompatible with MobileFrontend. Only the first tab is displayed, and the rest of the tabs (and their text) disappear. The FSD uses HeaderTabs to display various entries. It was necessary to either fix those or disable them for mobile view. The solution: I was able to disable HeaderTabs using MobileDetect extension. It introduces a function called mobiledetect(), which returns true when a mobile device is detected, and false otherwise. I added a simple if statement in LocalSettings.php which excluded HeaderTabs from loading on mobile browsers.
2. The mobile menu looks incomplete; there doesn't seem to be an easy way to add important links to the mobile menu.
3. Noticed by Ian (one of my mentors): 2 column view doesn't merge into a single column during mobile view, i.e. things that appear on the right column in a wide desktop view should come in-line in the mobile view. This is caused by the styling of the form: float: left; float: right, etc. Solution: I replaced those styles with div classes left-float and right-float. Then I defined those classes in MediaWiki:Common.css and used a media query to bring the 2 columns in-line for screen size lesser than 800 px.
4. Suggested by Andrew (my mentor), tables appear crammed in small screens. I am currently working on this issue. With the help of flexboxes and CSS, I am trying to make long horizontal tables appear vertical during mobile view.

Things I plan to work on in the coming week:

1. Add the FSD logo to the mobile site
2. Theme the mobile site so that it looks more like the FSF Directory theme
3. Find a way to enable mobile view on desktops of smaller sizes (less than 800 px)
4. And most importantly, spend time learning, researching, and building something useful.

We recently asked you to contact your Members of European Parliment (MEPs) to express your opposition to the Copyright Directive, a proposed policy including a section called Article 13. Article 13 threatens free speech, free culture, and free software. A number of you contacted your MEPs and wrote back to us -- thank you!

In spite of your efforts, 15 MEPs in the Legal Affairs Committee (JURI) voted against Web freedom and passed the Copyright Directive through its first round of approval.

But there's still hope! The second round is coming up this Thursday, July 5th. We're urging you to contact your MEPs before then.

Talk to your MEP before July 5th to #SaveYourInternet.

How to contact your MEP

Find their details

Europa.eu contains contact information for all MEPs. This includes email addresses, Twitter accounts, mailing addresses, and phone numbers.

Call

Calling is one of the most important things you can do. Try a sample script:

Hi, I'm [NAME]. I live in [LOCATION]. I'm calling to let you know that I oppose Article 13 of the Copyright Directive. Thank you.

It's that simple. If you want to say more, tell the person you're talking with a bit about yourself -- are you an artist concerned for the future of your art? A developer or free software activist looking out for software freedom? Maybe you're a student, parent, or voter concerned about the future of the Web.

Feel free to talk more about why you care about Article 13 and its impact, including the ways it's bad for the Web, free culture, free speech, and free software. Some key points include:

• It harms free speech and free expression.
• It limits lawful use of commentary, parody, and remix.
• It will automatically filter out source code that is being legally used under free software licenses.

For more ideas, Julia Reda has written about some of the consequences of Article 13 passing.

Email your MEP

Not sure what to say? Try this sample script, or write your own:

Dear [NAME],

I am writing to urge you to vote against the Copyright Directive this July.

The Copyright Directive will turn code sharing platforms that are used to build software into censorship machines. When we say software, not only do we mean things like apps for our convenience, but also the digital infrastructure that runs our world.

Much of this technology is free software -- software that uses licenses that respect the freedom of users and developers of software. Among other things, it allows developers to use, modify, and reuse code. Automatic filtering would prevent the legal and rightful uploading of code that uses these licenses -- a major blow for development and digital freedom.

I hope you'll do the right thing and vote for freedom with a vote against the Copyright Directive.

Cheers,
[NAME]

Social media

We know that many of your MEPs maintain accounts on Twitter. You can Tweet at them, using the hashtags SaveYourInternet, CensorshipMachine, and DeleteArt13.

What else can I do?

Share this post with your friends! Educating others and raising awareness of these issues helps people understand how important these policies are.

If you write to your MEP, share your letters with us (info@fsf.org) and those in your networks: having examples of what to say makes it easier to write a letter. Please feel free to also contact us about phone calls you make.

To learn more, you can check out the links below:

• Various articles by April concerning the latest developments in the fight against the Copyright Directive, and actions you can take.
• A detailed analysis (with flow charts!) from Communia.
• Writing by Julia Reda, an MEP.

You can also support the work of the Free Software Foundation by supporting our Spring fundraising and membership drive.