Richard Stallman's name has now been taken off the official web page of the steering committee for GCC, reports IT Wire. But they also note new changes this week in the management team of the Free Software Foundation: A statement from [FSF executive director John] Sullivan, deputy director John Hsieh, and chief technology officer Ruben Rodriguez on 30 March said: "As members of FSF management, we have decided to resign, with specific end dates to be determined. We believe in the importance of the FSF's mission and feel a new team will be better placed to implement recent changes in governance..." The resignations come in the wake of FSF founder Richard Stallman announcing on 19 March, during the organisation's annual LibrePlanet conference this year that he was rejoining the board. "Some of our colleagues in the FSF have decided to resign," reads an official response from the FSF. "We are grateful for the good work they have done for so long, and we will miss them. We regret losing them; we regret the situation that has motivated them to leave." Another FSF board member also resigned last week. Meanwhile, Ars Technica reports the FSF has created a new seat on the board to be filled by someone from FSF union staff, with acting FSF President Geoffrey Knauth calling it "an important step in the FSF's effort to recognize and support new leadership, to connect that leadership to the community, to improve transparency and accountability, and to build trust. There is still considerable work to be done, and that work will continue." Ars Technica adds: The elephant in the room that the FSF's remaining board members seem determined to ignore is the continued presence of Stallman himself — who, along with the rest of the FSF board, will soon need to undergo its new "transparent, formal process for identifying [members] who are wise, capable, and committed to the FSF's mission."

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Early Friday the principal author of GNU Privacy Guard (the free encryption software) warned that version 1.9.0 of its cryptographic library Libgcrypt, released January 19, had a "severe" security vulnerability and should not be used. A new version 1.9.1, which fixes the flaw, is available for download, Help Net Security reports: He also noted that Fedora 34 (scheduled to be released in April 2021) and Gentoo Linux are already using the vulnerable version... [I]t's a heap buffer overflow due to an incorrect assumption in the block buffer management code. Just decrypting some data can overflow a heap buffer with attacker controlled data, no verification or signature is validated before the vulnerability occurs. It was discovered and flagged by Google Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy and affects only Libgcrypt v1.9.0. "Exploiting this bug is simple and thus immediate action for 1.9.0 users is required..." Koch posted on the GnuPG mailing list. "The 1.9.0 tarballs on our FTP server have been renamed so that scripts won't be able to get this version anymore."

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Long-time Slashdot reader lee1 shares his recent article from LWN: On November 26, version 6.1 of GNU Octave, a language and environment for numerical computing, was released. There are several new features and enhancements in the new version, including improvements to graphics output, better communication with web services, and over 40 new functions... In the words of its manual: GNU Octave is a high-level language primarily intended for numerical computations. It is typically used for such problems as solving linear and nonlinear equations, numerical linear algebra, statistical analysis, and for performing other numerical experiments. Octave is free software distributed under the GPLv3. The program was first publicly released in 1993; it began as a teaching tool for students in a chemical engineering class. The professors, James B. Rawlings and John G. Ekerdt, tried to have the students use Fortran, but found that they were spending too much time trying to get their programs to compile and run instead of working on the actual substance of their assignments... Octave became part of the GNU project in 1997... Octave, written in C, C++, and Fortran, soon adopted the goal and policy of being a fully compatible replacement for MATLAB. According to the Octave Wiki, any differences between Octave and MATLAB are considered to be bugs, "in general", and most existing MATLAB scripts will work unmodified when fed to Octave, and vice versa... When octave is started in the terminal it brings up an interactive prompt. The user can type in expressions, and the results are printed immediately.

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All the videos have now appeared online for the talks at this year's virtual EmacsConf 2020, "the conference about the joy of Emacs, Emacs Lisp, and memorizing key sequences." And among them are an appearance by 67-year-old Richard Stallman, reminding the audience he'd created the first Emacs editor in 1976 "with some help from Guy Steele," then created GNU Emacs in 1984. Stallman was there to tell the history of the GNU Emacs Lisp Package Archive (and the licensing issues involved) — and how it's ultimately led to the creation of the NonGNU ELPA. "The fundamental plan of NonGNU ELPA is that we won't ask for copyright assignments for those packages, so we won't be able to put them into core Emacs, at least not easily — but we will have some control over how we distribute them. We can put any package into NonGNU ELPA as long as its free software. "If we like it, we can set up that way for users to get it. We can put the package in exactly as it is, if there's no problem at all with it. We can make an arrangement with the package's developers to work on it with us and maintain it directly for distribution by NonGNU ELPA. But if they are not interested, we can put it in ourselves, and if we need to make any changes we can do so. So NonGNU ELPA is not meant to be just a way that others can distribute their packages. Its meant at least in a minimal, technical sense to work with GNU Emacs, and we will make changes if necessary so that it works smoothly with GNU Emacs... "The idea is to have a single Git repository where you can download various packages, but they won't be maintained there. Each of those packages will be copied automatically from some other place, probably some other people have the right access to work on it. This way we can avoid giving a gigantic number of people access to it. "So far NonGNU ELPA is just a plan. We need people to implement the plan, so if you'd like to help, please write to me. I think this is a very important step for progress, and it's got to be implemented. Thanks, and happy hacking." Stallman provided a status update on NonGNU ELPA as part of the 46-minute Q&A that followed. "The creation of it has started. There's an archive and you can download packages. There's a repository to put it in... Still working out the procedures, how to make the arrangements with developers, etc." But he also answered questions on other topics. Some highlights: Q: Which distro of GNU/Linux do you use? guix? or something else? RMS: Trisquel. Q: If you knew that you would get hit by a bus tomorrow, say because of a fortune-teller, what would you leave behind in terms of advice for stewardship of Emacs and its future? RMS: Focus on keeping the community strong in defending freedom. If given the choice to have more people developing the software or defending the software, choose the latter. Guard your soul carefully... :P Q: Would you mind sharing your Emacs configuration files? RMS: Configuration files are personal and will not be shared.

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"Today, on October 4th, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) celebrates its thirty-fifth year of fighting for software freedom," announces a blog post at FSF.org: Our work will not be finished until every computer user is able to do all of their digital tasks in complete freedom — whether that's on a desktop, laptop, or the computer in your pocket. The fight for free software continues, and we wouldn't be here without you. To celebrate, we have a full week of announcements and surprises planned starting today, and we will end in an online anniversary event featuring both live and prerecorded segments this Friday, October 9th, from 12:00 EDT (16:00 UTC) until 17:00 EDT (21:00 UTC). We'd love for you to join in celebration of this amazing community by submitting a short (two-minute) video sharing your favorite memory about free software or the FSF, and a wish for the future of software freedom. We'll be collecting the videos all week and airing a selection during the birthday event on October 9th... If you are able to, please make a donation of $35 or more to help keep the fight for user freedom going another 35 years, we'll send you a commemorative pin... We're another year older, but that doesn't mean we're slowing down our efforts to bring software freedom to users around the globe. Stay tuned for more information on how we plan to ring in the FSF's next year, and the vital role each one of us plays in ensuring free software's success for the future. We hope that you'll be able to take part in our festivities this week! The announcement suggests 10 different ways to celebrate, which include: Try a fully free distribution of GNU/Linux, which can be run "live" without making any permanent changes to your computer's hard drive. Take an hour to follow our Email Self-Defense Guide, and learn how to opt out of bulk surveillance . Download and experiment with one of the oldest parts of the GNU operating system, the GNU Emacs text editor. Try the tutorial by launching the editor and typing Ctrl-h + t (C-h t), or see if you can make it through some of the games included with Emacs, such as Alt-x (M-x) dunnet or M-x tetris. Make the commitment to replace one nonfree program that you use with one that respects your freedom, such as using LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office. Petition the administrators of your favorite Web site to free the proprietary JavaScript lurking on their page that many users run and download without ever realizing it.

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LWN.net re-visits the emacs-devel mailing list, where the Emacs 28 development cycle has revived discussions about how to make the text editor more "modern" and attractive to new users: A default dark theme may not be in the future, leading one to think that there may yet be hope for the world in general. But there does seem to be general agreement that Emacs could benefit from a better, more centralized approach to color themes, rather than having color names hard-coded throughout various Elisp packages. From that, a proper theme engine could be supported, making dark themes and such easily available to those who want them... Another area where Emacs is insufficiently "modern", it seems, has to do with keyboard and mouse bindings. On the keyboard side, users have come to expect certain actions from certain keystrokes; ^X to cut a selection, ^V to paste it, etc. These bindings are easily had by turning on the Cua mode, but new users tend not to know about this mode or how to enable it. Many participants in the discussion said that this mode should be on by default. That, of course, would break the finger memory of large numbers of existing Emacs users, who would be unlikely to appreciate the disruption. Or, as Richard Stallman put it: It is not an option to change these basic key bindings to imitate other, newer editors. It would create a different editor that we Emacs users would never switch to. It is unfortunate that the people who implemented the newer editors chose incompatibility with Emacs.... The situation with mouse behavior is similar; as several participants in the discussion pointed out, users of graphical interfaces have come to expect that a right-button click will produce a menu of available actions. In Emacs, instead, that button marks a region ("selection"), with a second click in the same spot yanking ("cutting") the selected text. Many experienced Emacs users have come to like this behavior, but it is surprising to newcomers. The right mouse button with the control key held down does produce a menu defined by the current major mode, but that is evidently not what is being requested here; that menu, some say, should present global actions rather mode-specific ones. Stallman suggested offering a "reshuffled mode" that would bring the context menu to an unadorned right-button click, and which would add some of the expected basic editing commands there as well. This would be relatively easy to do, he said, since mouse bindings are separate from everything else. Besides, as he noted, the current mouse behavior was derived from "what was the standard in X Windows around 1990"; while one wouldn't want to act in haste, it might just be about time for an update. Other proposed changes involved "discoverability," including the default enabling of various modes, although to incorporate them into GNU Emacs "would often require the author to sign copyrights over to the Free Software Foundation, which is not something all authors are willing to do..."

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