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Wine Wednesday: Donate to help Conservancy and win a special potable prize!

by Deb Nicholson on January 7, 2020

Our highest donor on Wednesday wins a bottle of wine... signed by the Wine developers. Put your donation bid in now!

Slightly fuzzy picture of a wine bottle with signatures on it

Photo by Karen Sandler, available under a CC.BY.SA license

For our Conservancy supporters who are legally allowed to drink, we have a fun challenge. One of our projects is named Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator), and they help developers compile Windows applications for Unix-like (including free software) environments. Wine is invaluable for folks who must run one or two non-free things for work or some other collaboration but would prefer not to run a whole proprietary operating system.

ANYWAY. They have also given us a bottle of wine (the beverage) to give away[1]. The bottle has been signed by Wine's lead developers at the 2019 WineConf. Our Executive Director, Karen Sandler spoke there about Wine and Conservancy. Check her out with the Wine folks below!

Tomorrow's highest donation (on Wednesday, aka TODAY), wins the wine. Donations must be at least $50 and you must be of legal drinking age where you live. You must be able to receive wine in the mail or be willing to help us arrange to get it to you via our global network of software freedom advocates and pals. Staff is also happy to try to deliver the wine in person at any of the free software events we're attending this year. All donations must be received by 11:59pm AoE.

Group picture of forty-three Wine project contributors

Photo by Francois Gouget

Thanks for participating in Wine Wednesday! Your donations on Wednesday (and through the 15th) will be doubled by our generous matching donors. Put your donation bid in now!

[1] Little known fact: it turns out that most Wine developers prefer beer!

Tags: Wine

Coming to Your Town? We'd Love to See You!

by Deb Nicholson on October 11, 2019

Conservancy staff are on the road this month. Check and see if we're coming to your town!

WineConf in Toronto, Canada

Karen will keynote WineConf, please say hello if you're there.

All Things Open in Raleigh, NC

Deb will be at All Things Open on October 14th and 15th. We're having a Supporters event on Tuesday night at 8pm, at Humble Pie in downtown Raleigh.

LISA in Portland, OR

Conservancy has booth 12 at the Portland Marriott Downtown Waterfront, during LISA -- taking place October 28 and 29. We could use your help between noon and 7pm on Monday the 28th and from 10am to 2pm on Tuesday the 29th.

If you can help with the booth at LISA please email us -- we'd really appreciate it!

Tags: Wine, events

Conservancy News Round-up

by Deb Nicholson on May 28, 2019

May is for code releases! Check out these videos, blog posts from member projects, code releases and upcoming events.

Recent Videos and Podcasts

Deb's talk on Free Software/Utopia is up, on the Free software Foundation's MediaGoblin server.

Deb was also the guest of honor on Libre Lounge, Episode 19: Community Development with Deb Nicholson. Thanks to Chris and Serge for their dedication to free software and to Conservancy's work!

On Free as in Freedom, Karen and Bradley discuss two additional permissions that can be used to “backport” the GPLv3 Termination provisions to GPLv2 — the Kernel Enforcement Statement Additional Permission, and the Red Hat Cooperation Commitment.

Our Member Projects Have Been Busy

This summer's Outreachy interns were announced. "Congratulations to the 43 interns accepted to the Outreachy May 2019 to August 2019 round!"

phpMyAdmin -- along with several other Conservancy projects -- are excited about participating in Outreachy this round.

MicroBlocks presented at ROBOLOT, an educational robotics conference held in Catalan. The video of their panel is about 75% Catalan and 25% English, so feel to skip around or brush up on your Catalan.

The Godot team attended GDC, aka the "Game Developers Conference" in San Francisco reported on their improved name recognition at this year's event.

The folks at Reproducible Builds, shared" that security and software supply chain attacks were in the news and that this was a busy month for their distro work.

Some recent code releases:

Etherpad merged in a big chunk of code to improve recovery from brief server outages. "The resulting code is 15% smaller than before, and is also much easier to comprehend."

What's coming up?

Catch up with staff:

Karen keynotes sambaXP on June 5th at 10:15 local time in Göttingen, Germany.

Bradley will be at the Ninth Annual RacketCon in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he will give a talk titled, "Conservancy and Racket: What We Can Do Together!"

Many of our projects have events coming up:

In addition to the aforementioned sambaXP and RacketCon...

First talks are announced for Selenium's upcoming London conference, tickets are available now.

North Bay Python has announced their dates for this year's event, November 2 & 3, 2019. Talk submissions will open soon!

Tags: conservancy, Wine, GPL, Kallithea, Google Summer of Code, Member Projects, Godot, Reproducible Builds, QEMU, Selenium, Outreachy

Conservancy's Member Projects are Building the Next Generation of the Free Software Movement

by Deb Nicholson on December 19, 2018

In order for free software to succeed, we must always be bringing new people to free software. In addition to bringing in developers, we need non-coding contributors and learners of all ages for our software to fulfill the promise of our movement. We love helping our member projects as they reach out to non-coding users and learners of all ages.

Conservancy is well-known for our work to support developers which is obviously super important -- there's no free software without well, people writing software. In fact, it's tough to build truly free software without free tools. So tools and code are critically important for software freedom, but I don't believe we can build a successful free software movement without conscientiously bringing in end-users. Many of our member projects focus on building amazing software for end-users, and maybe (while you're fixing computers for family over the holidays?) one of them can help you bring someone into the free software fold.

Several of our projects don't maintain code at all and/or work solely on helping people learn more about free software. MicroBlocks is a new programming language that enables kids and lifelong learners to start building toys or tools right away. Teaching Open Source collects and advises on curricula that helps college students understand open source development and its legal underpinnings. North Bay Python is a community-driven conference serving local Python developers -- including beginners. Outreachy brings people from underrepresented groups into free software via paid internships. The longevity of the free software movement depends on our collective ability to bring in young people and new people so we are proud to support educational efforts.

Two of our newest projects maintain code bases specifically for people who work at non-profits. Non-profit folks love stuff that is free as in cost and while they appreciate free as in freedom -- they also need code that does not need a lot of tinkering to be deployed. Backdrop CMS is a lightweight, easy to deploy Drupal fork specifically designed for small businesses and non-profits. Houdini helps organizations manage every aspect of their fundraising work. Free software is a good mission match for change organizations so it was great to welcome in two projects this year that are working intentionally to serve this sector.

Of course, we believe that software freedom is for everyone and a few Conservancy projects provide tools that can be used by anyone at all. Etherpad is shared note-taking platform that we use nearly every day in our work at Conservancy. Inkscape can be used for serious artists or those just dabbling in design. There are loads of tutorial videos to help new folks get acclimated and productive. Need a band flyer or church program? There's free software for that!

We even have projects at Conservancy that help people who are just beginning to explore free software. Homebrew enables users to install free software on their Apple systems while Wine helps people use a Windows program on a free operating systems. If you don't work at somewhere like the Conservancy, it can be difficult to ditch proprietary software. Projects like Homebrew and Wine help users find ways to use free software where they can and find a way to transition away from the non-free stuff at their own pace.

So wherever you are in your software freedom journey, Conservancy might have a project that can help. We look forward to helping our member projects do even more to bring in new fans, users and supporters of their work in 2019. Help us help them, by donating to Conservancy today! And be sure to let us know if one of our member projects helped you turn a new person into a free software user -- we love those stories.

Tags: conservancy, Wine, Homebrew, Outreachy, inkscape

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