GNU philosophy - Essays on Free Software

Main

Description

GNU philosophy is the GNU Project’s exhaustive collection of articles and essays about free software and related matters. It provides all of them standalone or collected as a huge single book, in Info, HTML, PDF, plain text, and every other format supported by Texinfo, in several different languages. It makes the individual Texinfo source code of any essay readily available for inclusion in another package’s documentation and also implements a way to generate the whole GNU website philosophy section automatically from the Texinfo sources. Last, but not least, it facilitates the future work of the FSF (Free Software Foundation) in the publication of free software articles collection books, like: “Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman”.

Some highlighted benefits are:

• It is more easy to spread GNU philosophy. The availability of several formats means that it is simpler for people to find the desired article in a file format that fits their constraints and suits the access, redistribution and presentation requirements.
• Besides its free software components, the GNU system ought to document its own philosophy. It is very natural for users to expect that the philosophy and history that inspired the GNU system existence be easily accessible within its documentation system.
• It makes life easier for authors who want to use their package documentation to spread the GNU philosophy. Before it there was no easy way to get GNU philosophical articles in an adequate format to include in arbitrary documentation; many articles only existed in HTML specifically tailored for GNU website, others only in plain text format hidden deeply inside package distributions, and a bunch in non-portable Texinfo extensively written for exclusive TeX processing.
• All essays and articles are written in the GNU Project’s standard, official and hub format: Texinfo. Making the GNU philosophical documents comply with GNU standards assists in uniformity and coherence. For instance, until this package conception it was remarkable the almost complete lack of essays in Info, the GNU Project’s official online documentation format.
• There is a single place of maintenance for GNU Project’s philosophical articles and essays. The upkeep of all GNU Project’s philosophy documents is optimized since no error must be corrected twice and every addition is atomically, and instantaneously, available in every supported format, for every intended purpose.

The maintainers set a clear commitment to not blindly take for granted the quality of automatic generated output, and therefore they adapt the Texinfo source code for the particularities of each available output format, in order to make it look better, but without the unmindful and excessive use of back-end specific code.

Download

The current stable release is 0.1.20140214 (released February 14, 2014).

Here are the compressed sources and a GPG detached signature:

https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/philosophy/philosophy-0.1.20140214.tar.gz
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/philosophy/philosophy-0.1.20140214.tar.gz.sig

Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:

http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy-0.1.20140214.tar.gz
http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy-0.1.20140214.tar.gz.sig

You can find that and earlier releases at a nearby GNU ftp mirror; or if automatic redirection does not work use the GNU main ftp server.

The oldest (non-GNU) releases are available from Savannah mirror download area (alternatively Savannah download area). They are only of historical interest and are no longer supported.

Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the .sig suffix) is intact. First, be sure to download both the .sig file and the corresponding tarball. Then, run a command like this:

gpg --verify philosophy-0.1.20140214.tar.gz.sig

If that command fails because you don’t have the required public key, then run this command to import it:

gpg --recv-keys 0x28D618AF --keyserver hkp://keys.gnupg.net

and rerun the ‘gpg --verify’ command.

This release is signed by Bruno Félix Rezende Ribeiro. His key fingerprint is ‘7CB1 208C 7336 56B7 5962 2500 27B9 C6FD 28D6 18AF’.

Check the key’s authenticity with the command

gpg --fingerprint 0x28D618AF | sed -n '/^[[:blank:]]\+Key/s/^.*= //p'

It must print the following fingerprint:

7CB1 208C 7336 56B7 5962  2500 27B9 C6FD 28D6 18AF

Otherwise something is wrong! In that case don’t use the downloaded tarball and contact the developers as described in Contact.

A CVS repository, where the development takes place, is also available. To stay up to date with the latest developments in the source tree, you can anonymously checkout the repository with the following command:

cvs -z9 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/philosophy co philosophy

Contact

You can get in touch with other users and the maintainers of this package subscribing to the mailing list. Anyone is welcome to join the list; to do so, visit the bug-philosophy web interface. You can use this list for all discussion, including asking for help and bug reporting, although the preferred method for reporting bugs is the dedicated bug tracking web interface described in Bug reporting. To post a message to all the list members, send email to bug-philosophy@gnu.org. To see the collection of prior postings to the list, visit the bug-philosophy archive.

If you feel somewhat chatty, eager for a somewhat more instantaneous response from community, you can join us on our friendly IRC channel: ‘irc://irc.freenode.net/philosophy’.

Bug reporting

If you come across some problem and need help you can contact the community as described in Contact. If you think you found a bug, but is not quite sure about it, you can instead ask for support on our support tracker. We will revise your post, advise you and take the appropriate measures. If you are confident you have found a bug, you can submit a bug report directly at our bug tracker. Please, when reporting a bug include enough information for the maintainers to reproduce the problem.

Contributing

This package is a collaborative effort and we encourage contributions from anyone and everyone — your help is very much appreciated. You can help in many ways:

• Donate to developers in order to support their work. See Donating.
• Help users in the mailing list and IRC channel.
• Find and report bugs, even better, fix the bugs you and others find. See Bug reporting.
• Translate the essays into other languages.
• Suggest, even better, create a Texinfo source for, new essays and articles, that are of free redistribution, in order include them in this package.

You can join the maintainers team to contribute to addition and maintenance of articles and essays at the development page. To get started hacking see how to hack.

Donating

If you find this package useful, please send a donation to its maintainers to support their work. If you use this package at your workplace, please suggest that the company make a donation. We appreciate contributions of any size – donations enable us to spend more time working on this package, and help cover our infrastructure expenses.

If you’d like to make a donation of any value, please send it to the following Bitcoin address:

1CDyAsXCK91hGMJyJjuf28pUSPbzUyn2Vv

Since we aren’t a tax-exempt organization, we can’t offer you a tax deduction, but for all donations over 0.05 BTC, we’d be happy to recognize your contribution in the donors page, the file DONORS in the top-level directory of the source tree and in GNU philosophy collection book’s chapter “Donors”, for the next release. In this case, after making the donation, send an email to philosophy@gnu.org giving your name and the amount donated, so we can keep track of people’s names and respective donation values.

We are also happy to consider making particular improvements or changes, or giving specific technical assistance, in return for a substantial donation over 0.5 BTC. If you would like to discuss this possibility, write to us at philosophy@gnu.org.

Another possibility is to pay a software maintenance fee. Again, write to us about this at philosophy@gnu.org to discuss how much you want to pay and how much maintenance we can offer in return.

Hacking

The development sources are available through CVS at Savannah:

https://savannah.gnu.org/cvs/?group=philosophy

If you are getting the sources from CVS (or change configure.ac), you’ll need to have GNU Autoconf, GNU Automake and GNU Texinfo installed to (re)build. All of these programs are available from https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/. Their required minimal versions are:

• GNU Autoconf 2.60
• GNU Automake 1.13
• GNU Texinfo 5.0

This release was bootstrapped with the following versions:

• GNU Autoconf 2.69
• GNU Automake 1.14.1
• GNU Texinfo 5.2

After getting the CVS sources, and installing the tools above, you can run, in the top-level directory of the source tree, ‘./bootstrap’ and then ‘srcdir/configure’ to do a fresh build. After that first time, running make should suffice. See file INSTALL.