karijes writes with news that the Middle End Lisp Translator extension for GCC has hit 1.0: "MELT is a high-level domain specific language for extending, customizing and exploring the GNU Compiler Collection. It targets advanced GCC users, giving them ability to hook on almost any GCC stage during compilation or interpretation phases. This release brings a lot of new things." New features include defmacro and changes to the antiquote operator.

noahfecks writes "It seems that the GCC developers are taking steps to roll out significant improvements after CLANG became more competitive. 'Among the highlights to look forward to right now with GCC 4.9 are: The Undefined Behavior Sanitizer has been ported to GCC; Ada and Fortran have seen upgrades; Improved C++14 support; RX100, RX200, and RX600 processor support; and Intel Silvermont hardware support.'"

PengPod is running a crowdfunder to create a GNU Linux/Android tablet, the PengPod 1040. This is their second such product; the first was mentioned on Slashdot last year. PengPod has pledged to make all source and tools used to build the images available, so users can build their own OS top to bottom to guarantee that it's free of NSA tracking. The PengPod has previously found some success as a low-cost touch platform for industrial/commercial control systems and is partnered with ViewTouch, the original inventors of the graphical POS to offer PengPod1040s as restaurant register systems. The feature that the developers seem keenest to emphasize is that the PengPod is built to run conventional desktop Linux distros without special hacking required; Android is the default OS, but it's been tested with several others (including Ubuntu Touch) listed on their Indiegogo page.

jones_supa writes "A new major version of the classic GNU Make software has been released. First of all, Make 4.0 has integration support for GNU Guile Scheme. Guile is the extension system of the GNU project that is a Scheme programming language implementation and now in the Make world will be the embedded extension language. 4.0 also features a new 'output-sync' option, 'trace-enables' for tracing of targets, a 'none' flag for the 'debug' argument, and the 'job server' and .ONESHELL features are now supported under Windows. There are also new assignment operators, a new function for writing to files, and other enhancements. It's been reported that Make 4.0 also has more than 80 bug-fixes. More details can be found from their release announcement on the mailing list."

benrothke writes "Of the books that author Pete Loshin has written in the past, a number of them are completely comprised of public domain information that he gathered. Titles such as Big book of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) RFCs, Big Book of IPsec RFCs, Big Book of Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) RFCs, and others, are simply bound copies of publicly available information. In two of his latest books, Practical Anonymity: Hiding in Plain Sight Online and Simple Steps to Data Encryption: A Practical Guide to Secure Computing, Loshin doesn't do the wholesale cut and paste like he did from the RFC books, but on the other side, doesn't offer much added information than the reader can get online." Read below for the rest of Ben's review.

jrepin points out an article by Richard Stallman following up on the 30th anniversary of the start of his efforts on the GNU Project. RMS explains why he thinks we should continue to push for broader adoption of free software principles. He writes, "Much has changed since the beginning of the free software movement: Most people in advanced countries now own computers — sometimes called “phones” — and use the internet with them. Non-free software still makes the users surrender control over their computing to someone else, but now there is another way to lose it: Service as a Software Substitute, or SaaSS, which means letting someone else’s server do your own computing activities. Both non-free software and SaaSS can spy on the user, shackle the user, and even attack the user. Malware is common in services and proprietary software products because the users don’t have control over them. That’s the fundamental issue: while non-free software and SaaSS are controlled by some other entity (typically a corporation or a state), free software is controlled by its users. Why does this control matter? Because freedom means having control over your own life. ... Schools — and all educational activities — influence the future of society through what they teach. So schools should teach exclusively free software, to transmit democratic values and the habit of helping other people. (Not to mention it helps a future generation of programmers master the craft.) To teach use of a non-free program is to implant dependence on its owner, which contradicts the social mission of the school. Proprietary developers would have us punish students who are good enough at heart to share software or curious enough to want to change it."

jrepin writes "Which day could be better suited for publishing a set of Hurd package releases than the GNU project's 30th birthday? These new releases bundle bug fixes and enhancements done since the last releases more than a decade ago; really too many (both years and improvements) to list them individually, The GNU Hurd is the GNU project's replacement for the Unix kernel. It is a collection of servers that run on the Mach microkernel to implement file systems, network protocols, file access control, and other features that are implemented by the Unix kernel or similar kernels (such as Linux)."

Thirty years ago, rms wrote: "Free Unix! Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed." And thus began the revolution. Thirty years after posting the initial announcement, it's hard to find someone who hasn't interacted with Free Software at some point, even if they didn't realize it. To celebrate, the FSF is holding an anniversary celebration and hackathon this weekend at MIT.

An anonymous reader writes "LLVM's libc++ standard library (an alternative to GNU libstdc++) now has full support for C++1y, which is expected to become C++14 next year. Code merged this week implements the full C++1y standard library, with support for new language features in the Clang compiler frontend nearly complete." GCC has some support for the soon-to-be standard too. The C++ standards committee is expected to produce a more or less final draft in just a few weeks. The LLVM and GCC C++14 status pages both have links to the proposals for the new features.

Twelve years ago, Slashdot interviewed Brad Kuhn in his then-role as VP of the Free Software Foundation. Kuhn is still involved with the FSF, but has gone on, after a stint as CTO for the Software Freedom Law Center, to concentrate his efforts as President, Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy. The Conservancy offers organization and support to copylefted and permissively licensed software, and Brad explains in the video below what that entails, as well as where the Conservancy fits in the expanding landscape of organizations that help protect the rights of software developers. Brad makes no bones about wishing for a world where all software is Free software, but that's a big-picture goal. In the meantime, there's a lot of work to go around, just making sure that developers' chosen licenses are intelligently selected, and properly respected.

An anonymous reader writes "With the LLVM/Clang migration, FreeBSD developers have now disabled building GCC and the GNU C++ standard library (libstdc++) as part of the FreeBSD base system. GCC and libstdc++ have been superseded by LLVM's Clang and libc++, respectively, on primary architectures for FreeBSD 10.0." You can still flip a few switches to get GCC, but the system compiler will still be clang. Update: 09/11 14:50 GMT by U L : Reader Noryungi noted that the What's Cooking for FreeBSD 10 page is also worth a look, adding "I have to say, this is shaping up to be a very interesting release. Bhyve [the BSD hypervisor], in particular, sounds very promising."

paroneayea writes "MediaGoblin 0.5.0 Goblin Force is released with a slew of new features: authentication plugins including OpenID and Mozilla Persona support, a new notification system, a new "reprocessing framework", and more! The project is also making progress towards its long-awaited federation goals via the Pump API, as used in pump.io. Rockin'!" (If the name doesn't ring a bell, Wikipedia helps: MediaGoblin is "a free, decentralized Web platform (server software) for hosting and sharing digital media.")

borgheron writes "A maintainer of GNUstep has launched a Kickstarter campaign to get the resources needed to make GNUstep more complete and bring the implementation to API compatibility with Mac OS X 10.6's Cocoa. This will allow applications for Mac OS X to run on GNU/Linux with a simple recompile using new tools developed by the GNUstep team to directly build from xcodeproj project files. If the Kickstarter project is funded beyond its $50,000 goal, it's possible that WebKit and Darling might also be completed allowing applications built on Mac OS X to run without the need for a recompile... think WINE-like functionality for Mac OS X applications on other platforms... including Windows, Linux, BSD, etc." GNUStep is pretty useful now, but increased coverage of newer Cocoa APIs would be nice, and Darling in particular is interesting by providing a portable Mach-O binary loader.

An anonymous reader writes "What is the best/newest hardware without trusted computing (TC) / Trusted Platform Module(TPM)? I am currently running ancient 32-bit hardware and thinking about an upgrade to something x64 with USB3, SATA3 and >1 core on the CPU ... but don't want TC/TPM. I have no need to run anything like Blu Ray movie disks or Microsoft Windows that requires TC/TPM or the UEFI boot process. Is anybody else still trying to avoid TC/TPM? What have your experiences been? Any pointers?" Worth reading on this front, too: Richard Stallman on so-called Trusted Computing,.

First time accepted submitter extraqwert writes "An organization wants me to send them my personal data by email. I certainly do trust them. However, I would like to politely ask them to send me their public key for encryption. The secretary probably does not know what it is. But they do have a pretty good IT department, so they can figure out. My question is, what is the proper wording for such a request? What is the right terminology to use? Should I say ``please send me your RSA key''? ``Public key''? ``PGP key''? Is there a standard and reasonable wording for such a request? (On my end, I am using GNU PGP: http://www.gnupg.org/ ) Any suggestions on how to be polite in this case?"

Via the FSF: "The first round of videos from LibrePlanet 2013 is now available for streaming and downloading. LibrePlanet is an annual conference sponsored and organized by the Free Software Foundation, with LibrePlanet 2013 being the best one yet. ... This year we set out to make sure LibrePlanet featured fully functioning live video streaming using only free software, and it was a great success. The videos are now available for viewing in VP8/Vorbis, both free media formats, and are hosted on an instance of GNU MediaGoblin, the social media sharing platform which many of you helped support." The rest of the videos should trickle onto their Mediagoblin instance over the next weeks. All of the videos are freely licensed (looks like a mixture of CC BY and BY-SA 3.0).

WebMink writes "In an interview at OSCON, Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical spoke about the vision behind the Ubuntu Edge phone as a concept device to test features the mobile industry is too conservative to try. Notably, he agreed with the Free Software Foundation's demands that the device should carry no proprietary software and have Free drivers (transcript): '... we'll ship this with Android and Ubuntu, no plans to put proprietary applications on it. We haven't finalized the silicon selection so we're looking at the next generation silicon from all major vendors. I would like to ship it with all Free drivers.'" Although not a hard promise, it is a promising development.

ectoman writes "Are firms responsible for GPL violations on code they receive from third parties? A German court thinks so. The Regional Court of Hamburg recently ruled that Fantec, a European media player maker, failed to distribute 'complete corresponding source code' for firmware found in some of its products. Fantec claims its third-party firmware supplier provided the company with appropriate source code, which Fantext made available online. But a hackathon organized by the Free Software Foundation Europe discovered that this source code was incomplete, and programmer Harald Welte filed suit. He won. Mark Radcliffe, an IP expert and senior partner at DLA Piper who specializes in open source licensing issues, has analyzed the case—and argued that it underscores the need for companies to implement internal GPL compliance processes. 'Fantec is a reminder that companies should adopt a formal FOSS use policy which should be integrated into the software development process,' he writes. 'These standards should include an understanding of the FOSS management processes of such third-party suppliers. The development of a network of trusted third-party suppliers is critical part of any FOSS compliance strategy.'"

First time accepted submitter chris.kohlhepp writes "The Emacs editor just got consolidated package management with "Feline Herd", offering 2000+ packages under one roof. No struggle with convoluted keyboard shortcuts — only easy GUI navigation via toolbar buttons! Every conceivable programming language is handled. Cuts the Emacs learning curve to a minimum for learners."

gnujoshua writes "The FSF has launched a fundraiser for Replicant, the fully free Android distro. As of version 4.0 0004, Replicant runs on 10 different devices, but, the hopes are that with additional funds, the developers will be able to purchase more devices and grow the project so it will run on more devices. Yesterday, the FSF asked Mark Shuttleworth if the Ubuntu EDGE would commit to using only free software and be able to support Replicant. But, in an AMA on Reddit, Shuttleworth confirmed that Replicant would not be supported because the EDGE hardware will require proprietary drivers/binary-blobs." Replicant now supports ten devices, compared to only the HTC Dream not all that long ago.