An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: For years, there's been a known security vulnerability hiding in the GNU C Library (glibc). This library, which is critical for Linux and many other operating systems and programs, had a dynamic memory management security hole that could be used for denial of service (DoS) attacks. Now, the security company, Check Point, has issued an open-source patch, which will make it much more difficult to exploit this memory allocation (malloc) problem. Check Point re-encountered this known problem when it discovered that so-called smart light bulbs could be used to hack into networks by exploiting unprotected single-linked-lists. The double-linked-list version of this problem had been fixed back in 2005 with Safe-Unlinking. But, the single-linked-list version, which is present in the memory primitive functions Fast-Bins and Thread Cache (TCache), remained vulnerable.

Now, the fix is in for this problem. This new built-in security mechanism is called Safe-Linking. It protects malloc by signing its single-linked-list pointers with random numbers derived from Linux's Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) functionality. Combined with memory chunk alignment integrity checks, it protects the memory pointers from hijacking attempts and thus the system itself. The patch is now being integrated with the most common standard C library implementation, glibc. Safe-Linking will be released in glibc 2.32 in August 2020. It's already up and running in glibc's popular embedded counterpart: uClibc-NG.

Emacs "predates Linux, and was once far more popular," writes LWN.net, while adding that the text editor "has fallen into relative obscurity over the years."

Then it reports on a "mega-thread" on the emacs-devel mailing list about how to make Emacs more appealing and attractive to users: The discussion started with a post from "ndame" asking why Emacs is "so square"; the appearance of things like buttons could be improved with rounded corners, they said. Richard Stallman, one of the original authors of Emacs, seemed somewhat dismissive in his reply: "Perhaps we should implement a mode that puts cosmetics on Emacs so it will appeal to those who judge by the surface of things." But Stefan Kangas thought there was more to it than that:

I think it's unfortunate if we assume that this is all bells and whistles. Graphical design elements can also improve usability. I also don't know that it's helpful to assume that the rest of the world will take the enlightened stance....

He wondered if there was "any reason not to improve the default look". Stallman said that there are some technical barriers in finding someone interested in and capable of doing the work needed, but there is an overarching problem that needs to be addressed first:

The code to interface Emacs to X-based GUIs needs rewriting by an expert, and has needed it for decades. Until it gets that rewrite, changes in it are likely to break something.

Stallman did agree that the graphical design could improve usability, "but I have a feeling that the changes that would help are deeper issues than the shape of corners".
It was a long and interesting discussion, touching on the popularity of both Vim and Visual Studio Code, while another post questioned whether Emacs should even be prioritizing its menu bar and tool bar.

One post suggested "starter kits" to make the text editor more friendly to newcomers, another suggested making Cntrl-C cut-and-paste the default key binding, and one asked whether it was Emacs' terminology and keyboard shortcuts that might be confusing to users coming from Microsoft Word. "You are basically making a commitment to being or becoming a power user..." argued another post.

"If you just want to do 'casual' text editing emacs is a very weird choice in 2020."

Long-time Slashdot reader blackbearnh writes: Since the COVID-19 pandemic has made Personal Protective Equipment worth it's weight in gold, Makers have been trying to help bridge the gap. While sewn masks have been the most common solution, the 3D printing community has been pitching in as well. The Montana Mask has been one of the most popular designs...

Thursday, the group Make the Masks announced that the design files and STLs to print the mask have been released under the GNU General Public License v3, allowing anyone to print, sell, remix or improve the design, as long as they conform to the license. Importantly, the GPLv3 includes an international non-exclusive patent grant, meaning that even if the inventors decide to apply for a patent, it will not restrict anyone from using the design.

Linus Torvalds himself "changed around the kernel's pipe code to use exclusive waits when reading or writing," reports Phoronix.

"While this doesn't mean much for traditional/common piping of data, the GNU Make job-server is a big benefactor as it relies upon a pipe for limiting the parallelism" -- especially on high-core-count CPUs.

This drew an interesting follow-up from Slashdot reader rockyb, who was wondering if anyone could verify that GNU Make 4.3 speeds up build times: I updated and released a fork of that called remake which includes hooks to profile a build, and has a complete debugger in it (although most of the time the better tracing that is in there is enough).

The most recent version has a feature though that I really like and use a lot which is adding an option to look in parent directories for a Makefile if none is found in the current directory.

You can download the source code from either github or sourceforge. Both have a full list of the release notes.

Sorry, at the time of this writing no packagers have picked up the newest release. Repology has a list of packages for older versions though.

Java "remains the world's most popular programming language," notes ZDNet, reporting on Oracle's release this week of Java Development Kit (JDK) 14, Oracle's "reference implementation of the Java 14 programming language spec." Rolling out in line with Oracle's six-monthly release schedule that began with Java 9 in 2017, JDK 14 includes enhancements that Oracle says will improve developer productivity... According to Georges Saab, Oracle vice president of development for the Java Platform, the faster six-monthly releases are helping developers adopt new features more rapidly due to regular expected changes. Java 9, for example, was released more than three years after Java 8...

Saab notes that major improvements in JDK 14 include a Foreign-Memory Access API enhancement (JEP 370), and improvements from Project Amber, another OpenJDK project, including Pattern Matching (JEP 305) and a preview of Records (JEP 359). Oracle JDK 14 will receive at least two quarterly updates in line with Oracle's critical-patch update schedule before Java 15 is released in September 2020.

Oracle is providing Java 14 as the Oracle OpenJDK release under an open-source GNU General Public License v2. It's also released under a commercial license using Oracle JDK. Most of the nearly 2,000 fixes in JDK 14 have been made by Oracle employees while 528 came from individual developers and other organizations. Some of the main contributors included Red Hat, SAP, Google, Arm, Intel, and NTT Data.

An anonymous reader quotes SD Times: The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced plans to launch a public code hosting and collaboration platform ("forge") this year. Members of the FSF tech team are currently reviewing ethical web-based software that will help teams work on their projects, with features like merge requests, bug tracking, and other common tools.

"Infrastructure is very important for free software, and it's unfortunate that so much free software development currently relies on sites that don't publish their source code, and require or encourage the use of proprietary software," FSF wrote in a blog post. "Our GNU ethical repository criteria aim to set a high standard for free software code hosting, and we hope to meet that with our new forge."

As of now, the team said it has been researching a list of candidate programs and analyzing them in terms of ethical and practical criteria.
The FSF blog post adds that "We plan on contributing improvements upstream for the new forge software we choose, to boost its score on those criteria...

"We'll communicate with the upstream developers to request improvements and help clarify any questions related to the ethical repository criteria."

"Linux kernel head Linus Torvalds has warned engineers against adding a module for the ZFS filesystem that was designed by Sun Microsystems -- and now owned by Oracle -- due to licensing issues," reports ZDNet: As reported by Phoronix, Torvalds has warned kernel developers against using ZFS on Linux, an implementation of OpenZFS, and refuses to merge any ZFS code until Oracle changes the open-source license it uses.

ZFS has long been licensed under Sun's Common Development and Distribution License as opposed to the Linux kernel, which is licensed under GNU General Public License (GPL). Torvalds aired his opinion on the matter in response to a developer who argued that a recent kernel change "broke an important third-party module: ZFS". The Linux kernel creator says he refuses to merge the ZFS module into the kernel because he can't risk a lawsuit from "litigious" Oracle -- which is still trying to sue Google for copyright violations over its use of Java APIs in Android -- and Torvalds won't do so until Oracle founder Larry Ellison signs off on its use in the Linux kernel.

"If somebody adds a kernel module like ZFS, they are on their own. I can't maintain it and I cannot be bound by other people's kernel changes," explained Torvalds. "And honestly, there is no way I can merge any of the ZFS efforts until I get an official letter from Oracle that is signed by their main legal counsel or preferably by Larry Ellison himself that says that yes, it's OK to do so and treat the end result as GPL'd," Torvalds continued.

"Other people think it can be OK to merge ZFS code into the kernel and that the module interface makes it OK, and that's their decision. But considering Oracle's litigious nature, and the questions over licensing, there's no way I can feel safe in ever doing so."

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: CNBC Explores released a 14-minute documentary this month called "The Rise Of Open-Source Software." It's already racked up 558,802 views on YouTube, arguing that open-source software "has essentially taken over the world. Companies in every industry, from Walmart to Exxon Mobile to Verizon, have open-sourced their projects. Microsoft has completely changed its point of view, and is now seen as a leader in the space. And in 2016 the U.S. government even promised to open-source at least 20% of all its new custom-developed code."

The documentary does mention the 1990s, when Microsoft "even went so far as to call Open Source 'Unamerican' and bad for intellectual property rights." But two and a half minutes in, they also tell the famous story of that 1970s printer jam at MIT which led to the purchase of a proprietary printer that inspired Richard Stallman to quit his job to develop the GNU operating system and spearhead the free software movement. And at three and a half minutes in, they also describe how Linus Torvalds "unceremoniously released" Linux in 1991, and report that "By the turn of the century, NASA, Dell, and IBM were all using it." And at 4:18, they mention "other open source projects" gaining popularity, including MySQL, Perl, and Apache.

"But for the layperson at the turn of the century, the rise of these technologies could have gone unnoticed. After all, hardly anyone ran Linux on their personal computers. But then in 2008, Google released Android devices, which ran on a modified version of Linux. Suddenly the operating system blew up the smartphone market..." (Chen Goldberg, Google's Director of Engineering, cites 2.5 billion active Android devices.) The documentary then traces the open source movement up through our current decade, even mentioning Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub, IBM's acquisition of Red Hat, and various monetization models (including GitHub's new "Sponsors" program). And it ends with the narrator calling open source development "the new norm..."

"After all, the success of Open Source reveals that collaboration and knowledge-sharing are more than just feel-good buzzwords. They're an effective business strategy. And if we're going to solve some of the world's biggest problems, many believe that we can't afford to hoard our resources and learnings."
Here's a list (in order of appearance) of the people interviewed:

• Nat Friedman, CEO of GitHub
• Devon Zuegel, Open-Source Product Manager, GitHub
• Chris Wright, CTO of Red Hat
• Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation
• Feross Aboukhadijeh, Open-Source Maintainer
• Chen Goldberg, Google's Director of Engineering

Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, even tells CNBC that 10,000 lines of code are added to Linux every day. "It is by far the highest-velocity, the most effective software development process in the history of computing... As the idea of sharing technology and collaborating collectively expands, we're moving into open hardware initiatives, data-sharing initiatives. And that's really going to be the future...

"The complexity of building these technologies isn't going down, it's only going up. We can get that technology out there faster when everybody works together."

Long-time Slashdot reader twocows writes: Hyperbola GNU/Linux, a FSF-approved distribution of GNU/Linux, has declared their intent to fork OpenBSD and become HyperbolaBSD..."
The news came earlier this week in a roadmap announcement promising "a completely new OS derived from several BSD implementations" (though Hyperbola was originally based on Arch snapshots and Debian development).

"This was not an easy decision to make, but we wish to use our time and resources to create a viable alternative to the current operating system trends which are actively seeking to undermine user choice and freedom." In 2017 Hyperbola dropped its support for systemd -- but its concerns go far beyond that: This will not be a "distro", but a hard fork of the OpenBSD kernel and userspace including new code written under GPLv3 and LGPLv3 to replace GPL-incompatible parts and non-free ones.

Reasons for this include:

- Linux kernel forcing adaption of DRM, including HDCP.

- Linux kernel proposed usage of Rust (which contains freedom flaws and a centralized code repository that is more prone to cyber attack and generally requires internet access to use.)

- Linux kernel being written without security and in mind. (KSPP is basically a dead project and Grsec is no longer free software)

- Many GNU userspace and core utils are all forcing adaption of features without build time options to disable them. E.g. (PulseAudio / SystemD / Rust / Java as forced dependencies....)

HyperbolaBSD is intended to be modular and minimalist so other projects will be able to re-use the code under free license.

An anonymous reader writes: The Free Software Foundation is holding its annual fundraiser, with a goal of attracting 600 new members by the end of December. (New members so far: 112.) "We are still fighting the oppressive nature of proprietary software," explains the campaign's web page. "We have made solid inroads, and the community is as passionate as ever."

As a 501(c)(3) charity the group's membership dues are all tax deductible, and associate memberships are just $10 a month ($5 for students). They come with special benefits including up to five email aliases in the member.fsf.org domain, eligibility to join the nonprofit Digital Credit Union, free admission to the annual LibrePlanet conference in Boston, and 20% discounts on FSF merchandise and GNU gear (including this delightful stuffed baby gnu).

And for its special year-end fundraiser, different levels are also eligible for patches, backpacks, a thermos, and a public thank you at gnu.org. "With your things neatly organized in a backpack covered with patches, and coffee forever to go, you will be ready to fight for freedom!"

And finally, they've also created images to share on social media, writing thta "It is not always easy to explain to your neighbor or friend what free software is, or why it is so important. But taking the time to explain it, and motivating the people in your community to think critically about how much control they actually have over their software is the only way to keep our community growing and counter the billions of dollars that proprietary software companies use to strip our user rights."

On Hackaday's hosting site Hackaday.io, an electrical engineer with a background in semiconductor physics argues that Linux's small market share is due to a lack of marketing: Not only does [Linux] have dominance when raw computing ability is needed, either in a supercomputer or a webserver, but it must have some ability to effectively work as a personal computer as well, otherwise Android wouldn't be so popular on smartphones and tablets. From there it follows that the only reason that Microsoft and Apple dominate the desktop world is because they have a marketing group behind their products, which provides customers with a comfortable customer service layer between themselves and the engineers and programmers at those companies, and also drowns out the message that Linux even exists in the personal computing realm...

Part of the problem too is that Linux and most of its associated software is free and open source. What is often a strength when it comes to the quality of software and its flexibility and customizablity becomes a weakness when there's no revenue coming in to actually fund a marketing group that would be able to address this core communications issue between potential future users and the creators of the software. Canonical, Red Hat, SUSE and others all had varying successes, but this illistrates another problem: the splintered nature of open-source software causes a fragmenting not just in the software itself but the resources. Imagine if there were hundreds of different versions of macOS that all Apple users had to learn about and then decide which one was the best for their needs...

I have been using Linux exclusively since I ditched XP for 5.10 Breezy Badger and would love to live in a world where I'm not forced into the corporate hellscape of a Windows environment every day for no other reason than most people already know how to use Windows. With a cohesive marketing strategy, I think this could become a reality, but it won't happen through passionate essays on "free as in freedom" or the proper way to pronounce "GNU" or the benefits of using Gentoo instead of Arch. It'll only come if someone can unify all the splintered groups around a cohesive, simple message and market it to the public.

"27 GNU project maintainers and developers have signed on to a joint statement asking for Richard Stallman to be removed from his leadership role at GNU," writes Slashdot reader twocows.

The statement argues that "Stallman's behavior over the years has undermined a core value of the GNU project: The empowerment of all computer users. GNU is not fulfilling its mission when the behavior of its leader alienates a large part of those we want to reach out to."

The Register reports: The GNU maintainer memo follows a statement issued by the Free Software Foundation on Sunday. The FSF said that because Stallman founded the GNU Project and the FSF, and until recently had led both, the relationship between the two organizations remains in flux. "Since RMS resigned as president of the FSF, but not as head of GNU, the FSF is now working with GNU leadership on a shared understanding of the relationship for the future," the FSF said.

Matt Lee, a free and open-source software developer and one of the 18 [now 27] signatories of the joint statement, said that the two organizations have been intertwined for so long -- the FSF provides GNU with financial, technical, and promotional assistance -- that their relationship is confusing. "For example, the GNU GPL is published by the FSF, not GNU," Lee said. "Key infrastructure that GNU relies on is owned by the FSF, and used by GNU and non-GNU projects alike."
ZDNet reports: Stallman's only comment on this situation so far has been: "As head of the GNU Project, I will be working with the FSF on how to structure the GNU Project's relationship with the FSF in the future."
LWN.net notes that the next day Stallman issued an additional statement: As Chief GNUisance, I'd like to reassure the community that there won't be any radical changes in the GNU Project's goals, principles and policies.

I would like to make incremental changes in how some decisions are made, because I won't be here forever and we need to ready others to make GNU Project decisions when I can no longer do so. But these won't lead to unbounded or radical changes.
But the Register notes that Stallman's personal web site has also changed the first headline across the top of its page. It used to promote the Free Software Foundation's giving guide, saying "If you participate in the commercial ritual of end-of-the-year presents, please avoid the digital products that would mistreat the people you give them to."

It nows says: I continue to be the Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project.

I do not intend to stop any time soon.

The NLNet Foundation is a non-profit supporting privacy, security, and the "open internet". Now the open source Libre RISC-V hybrid CPU/GPU is applying for eight additional grants from the NLNet Foundation, according to this update from the project's Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton (Slashdot reader #517,947): Details on each Grant Application are on the newly-opened RISC-V Community Forum.

The general idea is to kick RISC-V into a commercially-viable mass-volume high gear by putting forward funding proposals for NEON/SSE-style Video Acceleration to be upstreamed for use by ffmpeg, vlc, mplayer and gstreamer; hardware-assisted Mesa 3D (a port of the RADV Vulkan Driver to RISC-V), and a hardware-accelerated OpenCL port to RISC-V. This all in a "Hybrid" fashion (a la NEON/SSE) as opposed to the "usual" way that 3D and Video is done, which hugely complicate both software drivers and applications debugging.

In addition, the Libre RISC-V SoC itself is applying for grants to do a gcc port supporting its Vectorisation Engine including auto-vectorisation, and, crucially, to do an entirely Libre-licensed ASIC Layout using LIP6.fr coriolis2, working in tandem with Chips4Makers to create a 180nm commercially-viable single-core dual-issue test ASIC.

The process takes approximately 2-3 months for approval. Once accepted, anyone may be the direct (tax-deductible) recipient of NLNet donations, for sub-tasks completed. Worth noting: Puri.sm is sponsoring the project, and, given NLNet's Charitable Status, donations from Corporations (or individuals) are 100% tax-deductible.

On Thursday, Richard Stallman reminded the GNU Project mailing list that "On September 16 I resigned as president of the Free Software Foundation, but the GNU Project and the FSF are not the same. I am still the head of the GNU Project (the Chief GNUisance), and I intend to continue as such."

The next day, with no explanation, a one-sentence update appeared on his personal blog at Stallman.org announcing that "I hereby step down as head of the GNU Project, effective immediately." But a few commenters on social media speculated that the post could have come from someone who'd hijacked Stallman's site -- and sure enough, that sentence had been removed by Sunday morning. In addition, for what it's worth Techrights.org posted an unconfirmed claim Sunday from "a generally reliable source" that "Stallman.org was defaced by an FSF employee. The deface has been reverted, and the domain appears to now be operating on non-FSF infrastructure..."

But whatever's happening, Richard Stallman is still living the life of Richard Stallman. Friday he also posted that he's looking for a room in a shared house or apartment for at least two months.

"There should not be a cat (unless hypoallergenic), or a dog that jumps up excitedly on people (unless quite small), or a digital listening device such as Echo, Siri or 'Hello Google', or a card lock that records who opens the door. I will ask about cameras."

On Tuesday Purism announced their first Librem 5 smartphones were rolling off the assembly line and heading to customers. "Seeing the amazing effort of the Purism team, and holding the first fully functioning Librem 5, has been the most inspirational moment of Purism's five year history," said their founder and CEO Todd Weaver.

On Wednesday they posted a video announcing that the phones were now shipping, and Friday they posted a short walk-through video. "The crowdsourced $700 Linux phone is actually becoming a real product," reports Ars Technica: Purism's demand that everything be open means most of the major component manufacturers were out of the question. Perhaps because of the limited hardware options, the internal construction of the Librem 5 is absolutely wild. While smartphones today are mostly a single mainboard with every component integrated into it, the Librem 5 actually has a pair of M.2 slots that house full-size, off-the-shelf LTE and Wi-Fi cards for connectivity, just like what you would find in an old laptop. The M.2 sockets look massive on top of the tiny phone motherboard, but you could probably replace or upgrade the cards if you wanted...

[Y]ou're not going to get cutting-edge hardware at a great price with the Librem 5. That's not the point, though. The point is that you are buying a Linux phone, with privacy and open source at the forefront of the design. There are hardware kill switches for the camera, microphone, WiFi/Bluetooth, and baseband on the side of the phone, ensuring none of the I/O turns on unless you want it to. The OS is the Free Software Foundation-endorsed PureOS, a Linux distribution that, in this case, has been reworked with a mobile UI. Purism says it will provide updates for the "lifetime" of the device, which would be a stark contrast to the two years of updates you get with an Android phone.

PureOS is a Debian-based Linux distro, and on the Librem 5, you'll get to switch between mobile versions of the Gnome and KDE environments. If you're at all interested in PureOS, Purism's YouTube page is worth picking through. Dozens of short videos show that, yes, this phone really runs full desktop-class Linux. Those same videos show the dev kit running things like the APT package manager through a terminal, a desktop version of Solitaire, Emacs, the Gnome disk utility, DOSBox, Apache Web Server, and more. If it runs on your desktop Linux computer, it will probably run on the Librem 5, albeit with a possibly not-touch-friendly UI. The Librem 5 can even be hooked up to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and you can run all these Linux apps with the normal input tools...

Selling a smartphone is a cutthroat business, and we've seen dozens of companies try and fail over the years. Purism didn't just survive long enough to ship a product -- it survived in what is probably the hardest way possible, by building a non-Android phone with demands that all the hardware components use open code. Making it this far is an amazing accomplishment.

This week Richard Stallman responded to "a certain amount of speculation and rumor" about his recent talk at Microsoft, addressing dark suggestions that, for example, Microsoft might've hoped to seduce Stallman away from the free software cause. "I resisted Steve Jobs's snow job in 1989 or 1990; I am no easy mark for those who want me to change my views....

"[T]he fact that people make nonfree software is no reason not to show them reasons why software should be free." I don't think Microsoft invited me with a view to seduction, or opposition research, or trickery, or misrepresention. I think some Microsoft executives are seriously interested in the ethical issues surrounding software. They may also be interested in carrying out some of the specific suggestions/requests I presented. I started with a list of actions that would help the free software community, and which I thought Microsoft might be amenable to, before stating the free software philosophy in the usual way. I think there is a chance that Microsoft might change some practices in ways that would help the Free World practically, even if they do not support us overall.

It is only a chance; I would not try to estimate the probability. Microsoft did not give me any promises to change; I did not ask for any.

What I can say now is that we should judge Microsoft's future actions by their nature and their effects. It would be a mistake to judge a given action more harshly if done by Microsoft than we would if some other company did the same thing. I've said this since 1997. That page describes some hostile things that Microsoft famously did. We should not forget them, but we should not maintain a burning grudge over actions that ended years ago. We should judge Microsoft in the future by what it does then.

Another thing I've said for years, about various companies, is that when a company does several different things, it is best to judge each thing on its own, provided they are separable. Actions that benefit freedom are good, and we should say so, while being careful not to let a small good distract us from a large evil.... Time will show us whether Microsoft begins to do substantial activities that we can judge as good. Let's encourage that in all prudent ways.
Stallman's 10 suggestions included urging Microsoft to "help make the web usable with Javascript deactivated" -- and he also called on Microsoft to release the source code of Windows under the GNU general public license.

"I know that is a stretch, but from what I heard there. it isn't totally impossible."

Thomas Bushnell, BSG, founded GNU's official kernel project, GNU Hurd, and maintained it from 1990 through 2003. This week on Medium he posted "a reflection on the departure of RMS." There has been some bad reporting, and that's a problem. While I have not waded through the entire email thread Selam G. has posted, my reaction was that RMS did not defend Epstein, and did not say that the victim in this case was acting voluntarily. But it's not the most important problem. It's not remotely close to being the most important problem.

This was an own-goal for RMS. He has had plenty of opportunities to learn how to stfu when that's necessary. He's responsible for relying too much on people's careful reading of his note, but even that's not the problem.

He thought that Marvin Minsky was being unfairly accused. Minsky was his friend for many many years, and I think he carries a lot of affection and loyalty for his memory. But Minsky is also dead, and there's plenty of time to discuss at leisure whatever questions there may be about his culpability. RMS treated the problem as being "let's make sure we don't criticize Minsky unfairly", when the problem was actually, "how can we come to terms with a history of MIT's institutional neglect of its responsibilities toward women and its apparent complicity with Epstein's crimes". While it is true we should not treat Minsky unfairly, it was not -- and is not -- a pressing concern, and by making it his concern, RMS signaled clearly that it was much more important to him than the question of the institution's patterns of problematic coddling of bad behavior. And, I think, some of those focusing themselves on careful parsing of RMS's words are falling into the same pitfall as he....

Minsky was RMS's protector for a long long time. He created the AI Lab, where I think RMS found the only happy home he ever knew. He kept the rest of the Institute at bay and insulated RMS from attack (as did other faculty that also had befriended RMS). I was around for most of the 90s, and I can confirm the unfortunate reality that RMS's behavior was a concern at the time, and that this protection was itself part of the problem...
Bushnell also calls Stallman "a tragic figure. He is one of the most brilliant people I've met, who I have always thought desperately craved friendship and camaraderie, and seems to have less and less of it all the time. This is all his doing; nobody does it to him. But it's still very sad. As far as I can tell, he believes his entire life's work is a failure..."

But Bushnell concludes that "It is time for the free software community to leave adolescence and move to adulthood, and this requires leaving childish tantrums, abusive language, and toxic environments behind."

Red Hat developer Matthias Clasen has announced the release of GNOME 3.34, bringing many performance improvements and better Wayland support. Phoronix reports: Making GNOME 3.34 particularly exciting is the plethora of optimizations/fixes in tow with this six-month update. Equally exciting are a ton of improvements and additions around the Wayland support to ensure its performance and feature parity to X11. GNOME 3.34 also brings other improvements like sandboxed browsing with Epiphany, GNOME Music enhancements, GNOME Software improvements, and a ton of other refinements throughout GNOME Shell, Mutter, and the many GNOME applications. More details can be found via release announcement and release notes.

In honor of FreeDOS's 25th birthday, project founder and coordinator Jim Hall agreed to answer the 10 best questions submitted by Slashdot readers. You asked and he answered! Read on for Jim's interview.

The NLNet Foundation is a non-profit supporting privacy, security, and the "open internet". Now the group has approved funding for the hybrid Libre RISC-V CPU/VPU/GPU, which will "pay for full-time engineering work to be carried out over the next year, and to pay for bounty-style tasks."

Long-time Slashdot reader lkcl explains why that's significant: High security software is irrelevant if the hardware is fundamentally compromised, for example with the Intel spying backdoor co-processor known as the Management Engine. The Libre RISCV SoC was begun as a way for users to regain trust and ownership of the hardware that they legitimately purchase.

This processor will be the first of its kind, as the first commercial SoC designed to give users the hardware and software source code of the 3D GPU, Video Decoder, main processor, boot process and the OS.

Shockingly, in the year 2019, whilst there are dozens of SoCs with full source code that are missing either a VPU or a GPU (such as the TI OMAP Series and Xilinx ZYNQ7000s), there does not exist a single commercial embedded SoC which has full source code for the bootloader, CPU, VPU and GPU. The iMX6 for example has etnaviv support for its GPU however the VPU is proprietary, and all of Rockchip and Allwinner's offerings use either MALI or PowerVR yet their VPUs have full source (reverse engineered in the case of Allwinner).

This processor, which will be quad core dual issue 800mhz RV64GC and capable of running full GNU/Linux SMP OSes, with 720p video playback and embedded level 25fps 3D performance in around 2.5 watts at 28nm, is designed to address that imbalance. Links and details on the Libre RISC-V SoC wiki.

The real question is: why is this project the only one of its kind, and why has no well funded existing Fabless Semiconductor Company tried something like this before? The benefits to businesses of having full source code are already well-known.