Registration for LibrePlanet 2012 is now open! March 24th/25th 2012 at the University of Massachusetts, Boston -- http://libreplanet.org/wiki/LibrePlanet2012

In 2009, Richard Stallman published “The JavaScript Trap.” It observed that JavaScript served from the Web is now often significant software—and if it's nonfree, it causes all the same problems for users as any other proprietary software. Anybody who's serious about protecting their freedom should reject nonfree JavaScript, just like you'd reject traditional proprietary desktop software.

Unfortunately, this has been easier said than done so far. Browsers will typically download and run JavaScript without the user's knowledge. People who want to avoid running nonfree JavaScript have had little recourse to date besides disabling JavaScript entirely—but that's throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Enter JavaScript License Web Labels. This is a format that we propose webmasters use to publish license information and source code for the JavaScript they deploy on their sites. It looks simple enough to be accessible to any visitor, but provides enough detail that automated tools can confirm that all of a site's JavaScript is actually free. Such software will make it practical for people to run free JavaScript and refuse nonfree code. Tools like this are already being developed: LibreJS is a plug-in for Mozilla-based browsers that will support JavaScript License Web Labels.

Webmasters should find a lot to like in JavaScript License Web Labels, too. We believe that webmasters that correctly publish JavaScript License Web Labels will comply with conditions in the GNU GPL and AGPL to accompany object code with a copy of the license terms and a way for recipients to get source code. The format is flexible enough that any interested webmaster should be able to use it: it doesn't require them to serve the JavaScript files any specific way, or coordinate with upstream JavaScript developers.

We hope these labels will empower users to be as selective about what licenses they'll accept for JavaScript as they are for traditional desktop software. That said, this is an early effort to tackle the problem, and we're happy to consider changes that can make it more attractive to webmasters or their visitors. For details about the decision-making process behind JavaScript License Web Labels, and how you can send feedback to us, please read our accompanying rationale document. We look forward to hearing from you.

Welcome to MediaGoblin 0.2.1: Gearing Up! This release has largely been about paving the way forward for MediaGoblin's future and restructuring under the hood. Nonetheless, a good number of awesome features got implemented for this release.

We've brought some old-school awesomeness with ascii art support to go along with our video support (which you may remember we were pretty jazzed about adding in our last release). In the future, you can expect to see support for all sorts of media types, including 3d models, slides, and presentations!

There are plenty of nice UI tweaks, including nice, tidy-looking comment areas. You can now easily apply Creative Commons licenses to your MediaGoblin media.

We're now able to provide a customizable EXIF metadata display. EXIF data means all the little tags that modern media recording devices include inside your image files. If your camera records it, you can display it: location, camera manufacturer, what the camera model was, the focal length, etc. If you took a sideways picture (and your camera is fancy enough to detect it) then MediaGoblin will rotate your image in the right direction for you. The default setting is hidden (but not scraped) metadata. Since this is MediaGoblin, it's easily customized for your instance -- just turn on exif_visible option in mediagoblin.ini.

GPS support is working! Does your camera have a GPS in it? Then you can haz maps. We worked hard to build compatibility with another great FLOSS project, OpenStreetMap. Again, this feature is off by default. You can enable option geolocation_map_visible in your mediagoblin.ini to show GPS info.

What about "under the hood" news? If MediaGoblin were a car we were building from scratch, then we recently decided to replace the engine. After significant discussion, we decided to switch from MongoDB to SQL using the python SQLAlchemy library. The SQL code is actually already very close to full deployment in the main repository and many parts have already performed well in tests. Huge props are due to Elrond who has made herculean efforts towards the Great Database Migration of 2012. The transition is already well on its way!

We're smoothing the way for federation. We're kicking off Kuneco (which means "togetherness" in Esperanto) is the collection of libraries we're building so that OStatus, the software that drives our inspiring forebears at StatusNet/identi.ca, will play nicely with python webapps. We also implemented PubSubHubbub (push) support in this release. We can now "push" notifications of our feeds out to the PubSubHubbub servers. One small step towards federation, in a series of many steps that will one day add up to a large step. More on this soon!

MediaGoblin is coming soon to a device near you! We want your phones, desktop applications and tablets to be able to submit media. We're putting together an API that will allow programmers to hook their applications into MediaGoblin. One day we'll be part of a massive decentralized ether and having a great API for interoperability is one way we start to get there.

So much amazing work happened to make this release possible! We could not have done without all of our amazing people. People worked over the holidays. Their paid jobs said, "Hey take a break this month." and our contributors took that time off and gifted it to the 0.2.1 release. Thanks so much to: Aleksej Serdjukov, Aaron Williamson, Christopher Allan Webber, Deb Nicholson, Elrond of Samba TNG, Jef van Schendel, Joar Wandborg, Karen Rustad, Michele Azzolari, Will Kahn-Greene! (If we missed you, let us know so we can correct the post!)

Get on board! MediaGoblin is actively seeking testers, translators, coders, and bug filers. We'll save you a seat as we set out on on the road to federation!

Las actividades cuyo objetivo es la "inclusión" de más personas en el empleo de las tecnologías digitales se basan en la suposición de que ésto sea invariablemente algo bueno. Parecería que así es, si se juzga considerando únicamente la conveniencia práctica inmediata. Sin embargo, si juzgamos también en términos de derechos humanos, es el tipo de mundo digital en el que nos quieren insertar lo que determina si se trata de un bien o de un mal. Antes de luchar por la inclusión digital, debemos cerciorarnos de que las personas estarán en un mundo digital bueno.

Favor de rellenar este formulario, para que podamos contactarle acerca de eventos futuros en la región madrileña.

Copyright developed in the age of the printing press, and was designed to fit with the system of centralized copying imposed by the printing press. But the copyright system does not fit well with computer networks, and only draconian punishments can enforce it.

The global corporations that profit from copyright are lobbying for draconian punishments, and to increase their copyright powers, while suppressing public access to technology. But if we seriously hope to serve the only legitimate purpose of copyright--to promote progress, for the benefit of the public--then we must make changes in the other direction.

Please fill out this form, so that we can contact you about future events in and around Braga.

Hi!

starting this month, thanks also to Chris (Jones) help and encouragement, I'm posting here the "C++11 tidbits" which I usually contribute to the Tools group Linux & VM partner newsletter. Enjoy! ;)

Despite the long name, Non-static Data Member Initializers are a rather straightforward new feature. In fact the GCC Bugzilla reveals novice C++ users often tried to use it in C++98, when the syntax was illegal! It must be said that the same feature is also available in Java, so adding it to C++ makes life easier for people using both languages.

The GCC implementation is brand new. It will be available soon in gcc-4.7.0 but it seems already quite stable and ready to play with.

People looking for self-contained specifications, outside the Standard itself, may consider fetching paper N2756 (and its earlier versions) from the ISO web site for more rationale.

In a nutshell, in C++11 the following are both legal:

struct A { int m; A() : m(7) { } }; struct B { int m = 7; // non-static data member initializer };

thus the code:

A a; B b; std::cout << a.m << '\n'; std::cout << b.m << std::endl;

prints '7' followed by '7', because both the 'm' member of 'a' and the 'm' member of 'b' are initialized to 7.

A non-static data member initializer can be always overridden, thus:

struct C { int m = 7; C() : m(14) { } }; C c; std::cout << c.m << std::endl;

prints '14', not '7'.

This is actually very useful in practice, because it allows concisely written classes with many constructors, most relying on non-static initializers while default values are overridden for a few, selected data members. For interesting examples see the ISO papers.

In the examples we have been using built-in integer types, but the feature works with any kind of data member, for example std::string, std::vector, or any user-defined type. It also integrates nicely with other C++11 features like initializer lists. For example, the following is perfectly legal:

struct D { std::vector<int> m{4, 5, 6}; };

The code:

D d; std::cout << d.m[0] << '\n'; std::cout << d.m[1] << '\n'; std::cout << d.m[2] << std::endl;

then prints '4', '5', and '6', on separate lines.

More non-trivial examples are available in the GCC test suite under g++.dg/cpp0x/nsdmi* and also in the C++ runtime library internals where the new construct is already exploited for the implementation of <mutex>. See, for example, once_flag, __mutex_base, and <condition_variable>.

As for all the other new C++ features, please don't hesitate to report bugs!

The slides of my talk about LTE and ModemManager in FOSDEM are now online at the Lanedo articles website:

• LTE is here and ModemManager is (almost) ready for it

Filed under: GNU Planet, Lanedo Planet, Meetings, Planets Tagged: FOSDEM, LTE, ModemManager, slides

If you ever get this cryptic error when loading an Android native app:

FATAL EXCEPTION: main java.lang.RuntimeException: Unable to start activity ComponentInfo{org.wikibooks.OpenGL/android.app.NativeActivity}: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Unable to load native library: /data/data/org.wikibooks.OpenGL/lib/libnative-activity.so at android.app.ActivityThread.performLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:1768) at android.app.ActivityThread.handleLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:1784) at android.app.ActivityThread.access$1500(ActivityThread.java:123) at android.app.ActivityThread$H.handleMessage(ActivityThread.java:939) at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:99) at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:130) at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:3835) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invokeNative(Native Method) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:507) at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:847) at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:605) at dalvik.system.NativeStart.main(Native Method) Caused by: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Unable to load native library: /data/data/org.wikibooks.OpenGL/lib/libnative-activity.so at android.app.NativeActivity.onCreate(NativeActivity.java:199) at android.app.Instrumentation.callActivityOnCreate(Instrumentation.java:1047) at android.app.ActivityThread.performLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:1722) ... 11 more

This may mean that Java couldn't find the ANativeActivity_onCreate function in your code, because it was stripped by the compiler.

If you use the native_app_glue NDK module, you may have noticed this strange code:

// Make sure glue isn't stripped. app_dummy();

Let's experiment what happens with and without this line:

Calling app_dummy:

$ arm-linux-androideabi-objdump -T libs/armeabi/libnative-activity.so | grep ANativeActivity_onCreate 000067fc g DF .text 000000f8 ANativeActivity_onCreate

Not calling app_dummy :

$ arm-linux-androideabi-objdump -T libs/armeabi/libnative-activity.so | grep ANativeActivity_onCreate $ # nothing

native_app_glue mainly defines Android callbacks. Since none of them are called directly by your code, the compiler strips the android_native_app_glue.o module entirely. If you use app_dummy however, it embeds it. Fortunately the compiler cannot strip the module on a per-function basis

That's why you need to call app_dummy when using the native_app_glue NDK module.

This looks like a ugly work-around though - isn't there a cleaner way?

Award for the Advancement of Free Software

The Free Software Foundation Award for the Advancement of Free Software is presented annually by FSF president Richard Stallman to an individual who has made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software, through activities that accord with the spirit of free software.

Last year, Rob Savoye was recognized with the Award for the Advancement of Free Software for his contributions to compiler and testing tools, and his leadership of the GNU Gnash project, a fully-free replacement for Adobe Flash. Savoye joined a prestigious list of previous winners including John Gilmore, Wietse Venema, Harald Welte, Ted Ts'o, Andrew Tridgell, Theo de Raadt, Alan Cox, Larry Lessig, Guido van Rossum, Brian Paul, Miguel de Icaza and Larry Wall.

Award for Projects of Social Benefit

Nominations are also open for the 2011 Award for Projects of Social Benefit.

This award is presented to the project or team responsible for applying free software, or the ideas of the free software movement, in a project that intentionally and significantly benefits society in other aspects of life.

We look to recognize projects or teams that encourage collaboration to accomplish social tasks. A long-term commitment to one's project (or the potential for a long-term commitment) is crucial to this end.

This award stresses the use of free software in the service of humanity. We have deliberately chosen this broad criterion so that many different areas of activity can be considered. However, one area that is not included is that of free software itself. Projects with a primary goal of promoting or advancing free software are not eligible for this award (we honor those projects with our annual Award for the Advancement of Free Software).

We will consider any project or team that uses free software or its philosophy to address a goal important to society. To qualify, a project must use free software, produce free documentation, or use the idea of free software as defined in the Free Software Definition. Work done commercially is eligible, but we will give this award to the project or team that best utilizes resources for society's greater benefit.

Last year, The Tor Project received this award, in recognition of its work to fight against surveillance inflicted by increasingly restrictive governments and to improve the safety and wellbeing of all Internet citizens.

Previous winners have included the Internet Archive, Creative Commons, Groklaw, the Sahana project, and Wikipedia.

Eligibility

In the case of both awards, previous winners are not eligible for nomination, but renomination of other previous nominees is encouraged. Only individuals are eligible for nomination for the Advancement of Free Software Award (not projects), and only projects can be nominated for the Social Benefit Award (not individuals).

The award committee has not been finalized, but is made up of previous winners, free software activists and FSF president, Richard Stallman.

Please send your nominations to award-nominations@gnu.org, on or before Monday, November 7th, 2011. Please submit nominations in the following format:

• In the email message subject line, either put the name of the person you are nominating for the Award for Advancement of Free Software, or put the name of the project for the Award for Projects of Social Benefit.

• Please include, in the body of your message, an explanation (40 lines or less) of the work done and why you think it is especially important to the advancement of software freedom or how it benefits society, respectively.

• Please state, in the body of your message, where to find the materials (e.g., software, manuals, or writing) which your nomination is based on.

Information about the previous awards can be found at http://www.fsf.org/awards. Winners will be recognized at an awards ceremony at the LibrePlanet conference tentatively scheduled for March 2012, in Boston, Massachusetts.

Activities directed at ``including'' more people in the use of digital technology are predicated on the assumption that such inclusion is invariably a good thing. It appears so, when judged solely by immediate practical convenience. However, if we also judge in terms of human rights, whether digital inclusion is good or bad depends on what kind of digital world we are to be included in. If we wish to work towards digital inclusion as a goal, it behooves us to make sure it is the good kind.

The speech is public and all are encouraged to attend.

Please fill out this form, so that we can contact you about future events in and around Avignon.

Veuillez remplir notre formulaire de contact, pour que nous puissions vous contacter au sujet d'événements à venir dans la région avignonaise.

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/freeipmi/freeipmi-1.1.2.tar.gz

Major Updates:

o In ipmi-oem, support new Dell C410x OEM extensions
slot-power-toggle, slot-power-control, get-port-map,
set-port-map.
o In ipmiconsole, support new --serial-keepalive-empty option.
o In bmc-device, support new --rearm-sensor option.
o In ipmi-oem, add additional Dell get-system-info options.
o In ipmi-sensors, workaround sensor reading issue on Sun Blade
x6250 and Sun Blade 6000M2.
o In libipmiconsole, do not deactivate a SOL payload if it
appears the SOL payload has been stolen, but we did not
receive a SOL deactivating flag.
o In libipmiconsole, fix corner case in which session not closed
cleanly when DEACTIVATE_ONLY flag specified.
o In libipmiconsole, workaround bug in Dell Poweredge M605,
M610, and M915 where instance count of SOL is always returned
as 0.

See http://www.gnu.org/software/freeipmi/NEWS for full release details.

Activities directed at ``including'' more people in the use of digital technology are predicated on the assumption that such inclusion is invariably a good thing. It appears so, when judged solely by immediate practical convenience. However, if we also judge in terms of human rights, whether digital inclusion is good or bad depends on what kind of digital world we are to be included in. If we wish to work towards digital inclusion as a goal, it behooves us to make sure it is the good kind.

Please fill out this form, so that we can contact you about future events in and around Singapore.

The Free Software Movement campaigns for computer users' freedom to cooperate and control their own computing. The Free Software Movement developed the GNU operating system, typically used together with the kernel Linux, specifically to make these freedoms possible.

Please fill out this form, so that we can contact you about future events in and around Singapore.

Dear all

It's great to see how fast the GNU Health community is growing, not only in installations, but in companies and institutions delivering implementation and training.

The latest service and training provider is Serpent Consulting Services in India.

"Serpent Consulting Services feels immense pleasure to say that we are in partnership with Thymbra and supporting GNU Health" , said Jay Vora, Managing Director from Serpent CS.

So, now, besides de supporting governments (like Brazil or the European Community) and multilateral organizations (like United Nations ), there are private companies that are commited to Free Software in health care using GNU Health.

We'll be generating a map with all the service and training partners in the world, so you can choose the one closest to you.

This raise in the number of service and training providers show that Free Software is both ethical and a great business model.

Thank you to all the health professionals and the community at large that contribute with their talent in suggestions, questions, answers and bug reports.

Finally, our gratitude goes to the GNU project, Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation , for adopting GNU Health in their GNU System !

We fight for equity in health care. We deliver health and education with Free Software universally, and it would have been impossible without your contribution.

If you provide services around GNU Health and want your company to be shown in the services section of http://health.gnu.org send us a mail to health@gnusolidario.org and we'll be happy to publish it.

Remember that, as in today, GNU Health runs on Tryton ... just in case ;-)

All the best

Luis Falcon
President
GNU Solidario

Richard Stallman parlera des buts et de la philosophie du Mouvement du Logiciel Libre, ainsi que de l'histoire du système d'exploitation GNU, qui en combinaison avec le noyau Linux est aujourd’hui utilisé par des dizaines de millions d'utilisateurs dans le monde.

Veuillez remplir notre formulaire de contact, pour que nous puissions vous contacter au sujet d'événements à venir dans la région marseillaise.

This week… 1611 commits, in 183 projects, by 205 happy hackers (and 216 were translation commits).

• In gnome-themes-standard Lapo Calamandrei started using PNGs as assets where possible, instead of SVG files.
• Many introspection improvements landed in gjs (support for interfaces, signals, glib properties…), Jasper St. Pierre blogged about GJS Improvements.
• Matthias Clasen added a systemd implementation of the session tracking part of gnome-session . (GNOME bug 666891)
• David King added an horizontal flip effect to gnome-video-effects . (GNOME bug 666930)
• Jasper St. Pierre added back a “popularity” field to extensions.gnome.org.
• Empathy was updated by Will Thompson to present confirmation dialogs when closing windows containing chat rooms . (GNOME bug 591756)
• In gnumeric Andreas J. Guelzow fixed rich text import from xslx files . (GNOME bug 669083)
• Faghmie Davids contributed many improvements to the Firebird provider of libgda.
• In gnome-shell Owen Taylor improved the default screencast pipeline, decreasing the quality setting for the vp8 codec from 10 to 8, and increasing the speed setting from 2 to 6 . (GNOME bug 669066)
• Stefano Palazzo contributed a Python 3 language file for gtksourceview . (GNOME bug 668136)
• Alexander Larsson updated gnome-contacts to use a dialog for avatar changing.
• Patricia Santana Cruz changed cheese to use PackageKit to install nautilus-sendto when needed; she wrote about this: PackageKit in Cheese . (GNOME bug 668072)
• Damien Sandras reimplemented call control functions into the new Ekiga call window.
• In gnome-games Robert Ancell ported uadrapassel from C++ to Vala.
• Claudio Saavedra updated eog to hide the titlebar when maximized . (GNOME bug 668652)
• In gedit Jesse van den Kieboom added an option to ensure that documents always end with a trailing newline.

Top projects Project Commits gtk+ 171 vala 68 baobab 62 gjs 55 evolution-data-server 50 glom 46 nautilus-actions 44 gnome-games 43 ostree 42 glib 41 Top authors Author Commits Modules Matthias Clasen 73 gtk+, glib, gnome-session and others Jasper St. Pierre 71 gjs, extensions-web, gobject-introspection and others Cosimo Cecchi 69 gtk+, gnome-themes-standard, nautilus and others Daniel Mustieles 52 glabels, nautilus-actions, evolution-data-server and others Colin Walters 50 ostree, ostree-init, gobject-introspection and others Chao-Hsiung Liao 48 gnome-terminal, gnome-games, gtksourceview and others Benjamin Otte 48 gtk+, gnome-themes-standard, glib Murray Cumming 44 glom, libgda, libepc and others Paolo Borelli 42 baobab, gtksourceview, gnome-themes-standard and others Ryan Lortie 39 baobab, gnome-games, jhbuild and others

Last week we told you of the ongoing move in Europe against ACTA — now coordinated protests are taking place across Europe on February 11th, and here's how you can get involved.

Read 'Signed, not sealed' and contact your country's Members of the European Parliment

Get involved!

• Join the ACTA group on reddit where protests are being organized.
• Read Stop ACTA in German or Stop ACTA in English.
• Check out the ACTA Protest wiki for information on starting or joining a protest in your area.

If you're not in Europe, please help spread the word to people who are. Defeating it in Europe is the first step to ending it once and for all.

For a refresher on why ACTA threatens free software, see http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/acta and the impact of ACTA on medicines.

Thank you for speaking up against ACTA,

Matt, Josh and John

This is to announce a stable release of idutils. The idutils package contains tools to create and efficiently search an index of "identifiers" from specified files: http://www.gnu.org/software/idutils/ Since 4.5 there have been two bug fixes and some build and portability improvements inherited via gnulib. See the NEWS below for a summary. Here are the compressed sources and a GPG detached signature[*]: http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/idutils/idutils-4.6.tar.xz http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/idutils/idutils-4.6.tar.xz.sig Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth: http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/idutils/idutils-4.6.tar.xz [*] Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the .sig suffix) is intact. First, be sure to download both the .sig file and the corresponding tarball. Then, run a command like this: gpg --verify idutils-4.6.tar.xz.sig If that command fails because you don't have the required public key, then run this command to import it: gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 7FD9FCCB000BEEEE and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command. This release was bootstrapped with the following tools: Autoconf 2.68.136-a1a00 Automake 1.11a Gnulib v0.0-6862-g0eab6e2 NEWS * Noteworthy changes in release 4.6 (2012-02-03) [stable] ** Bug fixes lid -L no longer mishandles open-ended ranges like "..2" and "2.." lid's -d, -o and -x options now work properly