03.19.14

GNU News: What’s New in GNU

Posted in News Roundup at 2:50 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Software Freedom

• Live Stream: Richard Stallman, A Free Digital Society

  Tonight, Dr. Richard Stallman is presenting a talk titled A Free Digital Society. Dr. Stallman will address the many threats to freedom in our digital society. He’ll focus on issues of digital surveillance that undermine the foundations of democracy, including massive surveillance, censorship, digital handcuffs, non-free software that controls users, and the ‘War on Sharing’.

• Free software and ethical consumption

  In September 1983, the GNU Project was born. GNU was to be a new kind of operating system: the first one with an explicit ethical goal.

  Perhaps a little background is needed. GNU stands for “GNU’s Not Unix.” Unix was an operating system (OS) that was in common use at the time, and the recursive acronym is a bit of programmers’ humour. The project emerged from the hacker culture at MIT, which had collapsed at the end of the 1970s when a technology company hired all but a few of the programmers.

• What Happened to the Vision in Open Source?

  Last week, I was writing about MediaGoblin when I was struck by a sudden realization: the project was not about code for its own sake. Instead it was about the sort of vision that seems to be disappearing recently from free and open source software (FOSS).

  What makes MediaGoblin stand out is not just the idea of an all-in-one file-sharer, as convenient as that might be. Rather, the code is an explicit critique of centralized web services like Instagram, which require users to communicate through a single web site rather than directly with each other. As events of the past few years have proved, such centralization threatens privacy and makes surveillance all too easy.

FSF Internal

• The FSF is hiring: Seeking a Boston-area full-time Web Developer

  The Free Software Foundation, a Boston-based 501(c)(3) charity with a worldwide mission to protect freedoms critical to the computer-using public, seeks a Boston-based individual to be its full-time Web Developer.

• LibrePlanet Free Software Conference Coming to Cambridge, March 22-23

  The theme of “Free Software, Free Society” will be explored at the LibrePlanet 2014 conference, to be held in Cambridge, MA at the Stata Center at MIT on March 22 and 23, 2014, by the Free Software Foundation in collaboration with MIT’s Student Information Processing Board.

GNU GPL

• Free Software Foundation opens registration for March 24th legal seminar on GPL Enforcement and Legal Ethics

• Interview with Roman Telezhinsky of Valentina

  In this edition, we conducted an email-based interview with Roman Telezhinsky, the lead developer of Valentina, a free software pattern making program, which is licensed under the GNU GPL version 3 (or any later version).

• Free Software Foundation to offer seminar on GPL enforcement and legal ethics

  The Free Software Foundation will be providing a half-day legal seminar titled “GPL Enforcement and Legal Ethics”, taking place on Monday, March 24 at Suffolk University Law School in Boston. Anyone can register to attend the seminar, though it is aimed particularly at practicing lawyers and law students. For practicing lawyers in the US, continuing legal education (CLE) credits are expected to be available for many states.

Popular GNU Programs

• GNU Guile 2.0.10 released

• grep-2.17 released

• GNU Guix Package Manager Looks To Grow

  The GNU Guix package manager / distribution system is still active in development and the developers have planned a road-map to reaching version 1.0.

• GNU Hurd Is Enjoying User-Space Device Drivers

  As some other good news for GNU Hurd, around 79% of the Debian archive is now building for GNU Hurd, including the Xfce desktop and Firefox web-browser. Future work planned for this GNU project is Xen PVH support, working x86_64 support, language bindings for translators, read-ahead, HDD/Sound/USB DDE support, and having a full GNU system with Hurd.

• GIMP free alternative to subscription model Photoshop updated

  That would be the oddly-named GIMP (acronym for: GNU Image Manipulation Program), an open source, high-end image editing and creation alternative to Adobe’s Photoshop and its now open-ended, monthly wallet-siphoning distribution mode for tasks like photo retouching, image editing and composition, and image authoring.

• You Say GIMP Was Right

  The split was the result of GIMP’s concern over policies at SourceForge, primarily SourceForge’s use of DevShare, an installer for Windows that bundles third party software offers with FOSS downloads. In addition, the GIMP folks had reservations about potentially deceptive “download here” buttons on ads being served by the likes of Google’s AdSense.

• Announcing GNU ease.js v0.2.0 and the Importance of Free JavaScript

• Updated GNU Framework Tries To Push “Free JavaScript”

  Out this Sunday is a major update to GNU ease.js, which relicenses this JavaScript framework to the GPLv3 and has several other changes. GNU ease.js helps the Free Software Foundation’s case for the “importance of free JavaScript” on the web.

Compilers

• Possible Summer Improvements To The GCC Compiler

  For any students looking to get involved with this year’s Google Summer of Code, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has several interesting projects that are looking to be tackled.

• GCC 4.9 Is Working Towards A Possible Release In April

  While GCC 4.9 is running behind schedule compared to where GCC 4.8 was at this time last year, open-source developers banding together still might get out the GNU Compiler Collection 4.9 release in early April with its many new compiler features.

• Samsung Brings OpenACC 1.0+ Support To GCC Fortran

  Samsung is still working towards bringing OpenACC support to GCC. We’ve seen Samsung developers working on OpenACC for GCC over the past several months — along with other OpenACC initiatives out of CodeSourcery, etc — and now there’s some new OpenACC GCC Fortran patches.

• Clang’s Competition For GCC On Intel Haswell

  This testing is quite simple and straightforward as it’s intended to just complement the AMD A10-7850K compiler benchmarks of the previous days. The processor being used this time around was the Intel Core i5 4670 that is a true quad-core CPU with a 3.4GHz base frequency and 3.8GHz Turbo Frequency. Being a Haswell CPU, it supports SSE 4.2, AVX 2.0, and all of the other latest-generation Intel extensions.

• GCC & LLVM Developers May Begin Collaborating

  Renato Golin of Linaro volleyed an interesting message to the GCC mailing list on Friday about “LLVM collaboration?” While controversial, he suggested LLVM and GCC developers begin collaborating due to an “unnecessary fence” between the competing compilers and decisions that need to be shared. He acknowledges while there’s licensing differences (GPL vs. UIUC / BSD) there’s differences between the compilers and their stacks that really shouldn’t exist as it hinders the users and developers.

• GCC, LLVM, Copyleft, Companies, and Non-Profits

  Most people know I’m a fan of RMS’ writing about Free Software and I agree with most (but not all) of his beliefs about software freedom politics and strategy. I was delighted to read RMS’ post about LLVM on the GCC mailing list on Friday. It’s clear and concise, and, as usual, I agree with most (but not all) of it, and I encourage people to read it. Meanwhile, upon reading comments on LWN on this post, I felt the need to add a few points to the discussion.

• Beignet Is Now Friendly With LLVM/Clang 3.5

  Intel’s Beignet open-source OpenCL implementation for their Linux graphics driver now switches to LLVM/Clang 3.5 as its preferred version.

• LLVM Leaps Ahead With Its Migration To C++11

Hardware

• LulzBot TAZ 3 3D printer now FSF-certified to respect your freedom

  The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today awarded Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification to the TAZ 3, the fifth model in the LulzBot line of 3D printers by Aleph Objects, Inc. The RYF certification mark means that the product meets the FSF’s standards in regard to users’ freedom, control over the product, and privacy.

• Coreboot Gets Ported To The Lenovo X230 Ultrabook

  Lenovo’s X230 is an “ultraportable business laptop” with 12.5-inch display, 2.96lb weight, and other modern features while boasting an Intel Core i5 series processor.

Privacy

• Cryptography Apps: How To Keep Your Personal Info Private

  As consumers living in a post-Edward Snowden world, we should remain aware of what cryptography applications are out there, and how we can utilize them to keep our information (and thus, ourselves) safer. This article is intended to discuss some of the more practical usages of cryptography in modern computing, including PGP/GPG encryption, encrypted chat programs such as Cryptocat, the anonymous Tor browser, and will touch on a major buzz item of 2013, Bitcoin.

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