Help improve the Free Software Directory by adding new entries and updating existing ones. Every Friday we meet on IRC in the #fsf channel on irc.freenode.org.

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.

Although passengers wouldn't be allowed until a few months later, the Channel Tunnel opened its gaping maw this week in 1994. The Chunnel chugs along with the longest underwater run of any tunnel to this day. To honor this anniversary, the theme this week remembers the geological work that went into realizing this tunnel.

If you are eager to help, and you can't wait or are simply unable to make it onto IRC on Friday, our participation guide will provide you with all the information you need to get started on helping the Directory today! There are also weekly Directory Meeting pages that everyone is welcome to contribute to before, during, and after each meeting. To see the meeting start time in your time zone, run this in GNU bash: date --date='TZ="America/New_York" 12:00 this Fri'

• aspell6-en-2018.04.16-0
• gama-1.22
• gnudos-1.11
• gnupg-2.2.6
• gnurl-7.59.0
• libidn-1.34
• linux-libre-4.16.4-gnu
• mcron-1.1.1
• nano-2.9.6
• parallel-20180422
• sed-4.5
• taler-bank-0.5.1
• taler-exchange-0.5.0
• taler-merchant-0.5.0

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.

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.

Software freedom is a worldwide issue, and we have a global mission to defend the rights of all software users everywhere, not just in the US, where we're based. As such, while English is the de facto language of the FSF and the GNU Project, we're continually trying to make free software and GNU information available in as many languages as possible.

The Free Software Supporter newsletter, currently being delivered to almost 190,000 inboxes worldwide, is a key communication tool connecting our supporters with the latest free software news every month. It's a summary of the work we do every month, as well as a compendium of news from our ally organizations, an update from the projects we support, and a record of the latest attacks on computer user freedom. We try to include as many prompts for activism and participation as possible, helping to guide your advocacy for software freedom.

So you can see why we want to make sure the Supporter is as accessible as possible to our global audience, and when one of our wonderful volunteers offered to translate the Supporter into Brazilian Portuguese, and we realized that the Brazilian Portuguese GNU translation team was willing to take on proofreading and additional support, we said, why not? Brazil is a hotbed of free software activism, thanks to our friends at the Free Software Foundation Latin America (FSFLA), and last year we presented a Free Software Award to Alexandre Oliva, a fierce defender of free software whose impact has been felt far beyond his home base in Brazil.

As with the other international issues of the Supporter, the Brazilian Portuguese version will be posted and sent between one and two weeks after the English version, but you'll still receive the English version the first business day of the month.

How can you help? Right now, we need to know who the readers are who prefer to get their free software news in Portuguese. If the new Portuguese edition of the Supporter is a good fit for you, sign up here – and even if it's not, pass it on to your family, friends, and colleagues!

Every week, free software activists from around the world come together in #fsf on irc.freenode.org to help improve the Free Software Directory. We had an exciting month working on the Directory with our wonderful stable of volunteers. These folks show up week in and week out to improve the Directory. It's also important to note the valiant efforts of those volunteers who can't make an appearance at the meeting proper, but still plug away at Directory entries during the week.

During April, the Directory passed 16,000 entries. At this pace, the Directory will be more than halfway to 17,000 by the end of 2018. On the mailing list this month, there were numerous matters presented: one matter under consideration is changing the Directory so that volunteers can upload the icon of a program. So for example, the Emacs logo would be listed next to the name of the program in the Directory entry.

If you would like to help update the Directory, meet with us every Friday in #fsf on irc.freenode.org from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. EST (16:00 to 19:00 UTC).

As part of his explanation of the early history of free software, Richard Stallman (RMS) often tells a story about his frustration with the locked-down software on a laser printer. If you're not familiar with the printer story, you can read it in RMS's own words here. It's an early, easy-to-understand example of how proprietary software deprives users of control over their lives.

In today's testimonial, an anonymous supporter details a much more recent incident that made it concrete to him how unjust, cruel, and arbitrary the restrictions imposed by software manufacturers can be. Because the writer is not a native English speaker, we've clarified his words a bit for readability.

Want to support our fight against nonfree software? Join the FSF today!

I’ve always supported free software, but never felt the concrete importance of it until proprietary firmware threatened to cause a big problem, in terms of money, time, and environmental impact, for the company where I work. It’s a mid-sized company, employing about one thousand people. It’s highly production-oriented, and we need to print about two or three thousand paper sheets per week only for the production plans, on a special kind of paper. This number doesn’t include any reprints or further needs, so the total printed pages can be even higher.

We used to print everything with an old printer, which worked fine, but it didn't have an integrated stapler, and required a lot of human time to staple all the sheets as needed. After a production increase and the consequent increase in printing of orders, we asked for a new printer with an integrated stapler.

After some weeks of testing and a lot of work to try and make the printer handle our production orders, we faced a big problem: the printer couldn’t do what we needed. If we tried to print on the special paper, the printer printed perfectly but automatically disabled the stapler, because it’s developed to not work with a thicker sheet of paper. We would need a more complex (and expensive) stapling system. If we modified the paper settings to “normal paper,” the stapler would work fine, but the printing came out faded.

We requested technical support, and after some tests, the technician said that the printer is capable of printing on the special paper, and it's capable of stapling, but it can't do both at the same time. Why doesn’t it work? Because the firmware doesn’t foresee this particular instance of use, and it can’t be modified. We need to use a thinner paper.

What about the 80 thousand paper sheets we already had in the warehouse? We managed this problem for months by printing different production orders with the old printer and hand-stapling, but this was a waste of time for us. It would have saved time to just throw away the extra paper and buy new paper, but this would have an unacceptable environmental and monetary impact.

There was absolutely no reason that the new printer couldn't print and staple the old paper, but the firmware developers simply wouldn't let us do it. Instead, we have had to adapt ourselves to the printer software. In a just and fair society, software could be adapted to people's needs, and people wouldn't have to adapt instead to the software. This is why free software is necessary.