Welcome to the Free Software Supporter, the Free Software
Foundation's (FSF) monthly news digest and action update—being read
by you and 233,478 other activists.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
September FSF40 challenge: Invite someone to come with you to FSF40
Forty years, forty links
Help us welcome free software supporters from all over the world in Boston
We want to see how you use free software every day!
The US government just made it harder for the public to comment on regulations
MS confidence in Windows 11: Pay us to host VMs for you when your desktop inevitably dies
Meta illegally collected data from Flo period and pregnancy app, jury finds
August GNU Emacs news
Join the FSF and friends in updating the Free Software Directory
LibrePlanet featured resource: Group: Software/research/ProgrammingLanguages
August GNU Spotlight with Amin Bandali featuring eleven new GNU releases: Emacs, Mes, and more!
Want to read this newsletter translated into another language? Scroll
to the end to read the Supporter in French or Spanish.
September FSF40 challenge: Invite someone to come with you to FSF40
Every month during our fortieth anniversary year, we're inviting free
software supporters everywhere to join us in celebrating #FSF40. For
this month's challenge, invite someone to come with you to the FSF40
celebration on October 4. It could be someone who is just as involved
in the free software movement as you or even someone who hadn't heard
the term "free software" until you invited them. We're excited for you
to join us! If you can't take part in this #FSF40Challenge, fear
not—we've got three more coming.
Have an idea for a challenge? Send us a message at
[email protected]!
Forty years, forty links
From August 16
Our fortieth anniversary is fast approaching. Here are forty links
from the FSF and GNU sites that give a sense of what we've been doing
all this time as we work for your freedom. Hint: some of these pages
may include answers for the trivia contest we'll hold during the FSF40
celebration on October 4.
Help us welcome free software supporters from all over the world in Boston
From August 15
We're excited to invite you to FSF40, our fortieth anniversary
celebration to be held the weekend of October 4, 2025. As we mark four
decades of defending and building software freedoms, your presence as
a local supporter is invaluable. If you are based in the northeast
United States, come celebrate forty years of software freedom
achievements and show out-of-towners a great time in Boston!
We want to see how you use free software every day!
From August 14
We want to honor the hard work that has gone into free software and
its development with the FSF40 photo contest. From August 14-31, 2025,
we invited free software supporters worldwide to share how they use
free software on a daily basis. Stay tuned for the upcoming voting
session to choose which photos best showcase free software every day!
The US government just made it harder for the public to comment on regulations
From August 18 by Matthew Gault
In the middle of August, POST was deactivated for third party
organizations, making it impossible to bypass regulation.gov's nonfree
JavaScript. POST is a very common function that allows an API key
holder to gather comments from people with their own forms and submit
these comments on their behalf. Because of the difficulty in making a
public comment on a regulation without using the online form, it often
pushes users to choose between freedom and speaking up. While some
sources do report that you can submit comments via mail, the work that
would go into that is often quite challenging. This tool getting
disabled functions as a chilling effect on user's freedoms and free
speech, and a strong push to force more people to use a web site that
doesn't respect their freedom.
MS confidence in Windows 11: Pay us to host VMs for you when your desktop inevitably dies
From August 13 by Gareth Halfacree
If you or your job uses Windows 10, not only is Microsoft forcing you
to switch to Windows 11, it is now asking users to pay for hosting on
a secondary device when Windows 11 inevitably crashes your older
device. There are many users and organizations that will not have the
luxury of owning multiple devices, nor should they need to in order to
use the device that they have paid for and should expect to work. This
is another one of Microsoft's artificial, money-making "problems,"
creating a supposed necessity. Users should be given the choice which
version of an operating system they want to use, and more generally,
which updates to implement.
Meta illegally collected data from Flo period and pregnancy app, jury finds
From August 5 by Jon Brodkin
When you can't examine the code behind an app like Flo, one of the
most popular period-tracking applications, you have no guarantee of
what the app is doing in the background or who your information is
shared with. Flo may have been caught red-handed giving Google and
Meta access to users' private in-app communications, but be aware that
not every nonfree software or app is similarly revealed to be
violating users' privacy in addition to their freedoms. Individual
users of Flo could not have prevented this illegal data-sharing, but
if the software was free, they could have at least known what they
were getting into by using the app. If you're currently using an app
like Flo, or some other app that has access to sensitive data,
consider storing that sensitive data in a place that deserves to be
trusted.
Join the FSF and friends in updating the Free Software Directory
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 version
control, IRC channels, documentation, and licensing. The Free Software
Directory has been a great resource to software users over the past
decade, but it needs your help staying up-to-date with new and
exciting free software projects.
To help, join our weekly IRC meetings on Fridays. Meetings take place
in the #fsf channel on Libera.Chat and usually include a handful of
regulars as well as newcomers. Libera.Chat is accessible from any IRC
client—Everyone's welcome!
LibrePlanet featured resource: Group: Software/research/ProgrammingLanguages
Every month on the LibrePlanet
wiki, we highlight one
resource that is interesting and useful—often one that could use
your help.
For this month, we are highlighting the Group:
Software/research/ProgrammingLanguages resource. The goal of this page
is to understand the status of various programming languages and
toolchains. It can help people deciding on a programming language to
choose or to learn, or enable people to understand where distributions
need contributions to support well a language. It could also contain
information on what language works where or if we can target specific
operating systems with free software or not. You are invited to help
update, adopt, spread, and improve this important resource.
To download: nearly all GNU software is available most reliably from
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/. Optionally, you may find faster download
speeds at a mirror located geographically closer to you by choosing
from the list of mirrors published at
https://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html, or you may use
https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a
(hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.
We appreciate everyone who donates to the Free Software Foundation,
and we'd like to give special recognition to the folks who have
donated $500 or more in the last month.
Assigning your copyright to the Free Software Foundation helps us
defend the GNU GPL and keep software free. The following individuals
have assigned their copyright to the FSF (and allowed public
appreciation) in the past month:
Collin Funk (GNU sed)
Lua Viana Reis (GNU Emacs)
Matthias Meijers (GNU Emacs)
Rudolf Erwin Polzer (GNU Chess)
Sean Devlin (GNU Emacs)
tusharhero (GNU Emacs)
Will Reed (GNU Guile)
Want to see your name on this list? Contribute to GNU and assign your
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