Debian continues participating in Outreachy, and we'd like to welcome our new Outreachy interns for this round, lasting from December 2019 to March 2020.

Anisa Kuci will work on Improving the DebConf fundraising processes, mentored by Karina Ture and Daniel Lange.

Sakshi Sangwan will work on Packaging GitLab's JS Modules, mentored by Utkarsh Gupta, Sruthi Chandran and Pirate Praveen.

Congratulations, Anisa and Sakshi! Welcome!

From the official website: Outreachy provides three-month internships for people from groups traditionally underrepresented in tech. Interns work remotely with mentors from Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities on projects ranging from programming, user experience, documentation, illustration and graphical design, to data science.

The Outreachy programme is possible in Debian thanks to the efforts of Debian developers and contributors who dedicate their free time to mentor students and outreach tasks, and the Software Freedom Conservancy's administrative support, as well as the continued support of Debian's donors, who provide funding for the internships.

Join us and help extend Debian! You can follow the work of the Outreachy interns reading their blogs (they are syndicated in Planet Debian), and chat with us in the #debian-outreach IRC channel and mailing list.

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Teus Benschop (teusbenschop)
• Nick Morrott (nickm)
• Ondřej Kobližek (kobla)
• Clément Hermann (nodens)
• Gordon Ball (chronitis)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Nikos Tsipinakis
• Joan Lledó
• Baptiste Beauplat
• Jianfeng Li

Congratulations!

Today, the Debian Project pledges to donate $5,000 to the GNOME Foundation in support of their ongoing patent defense. On October 23, we wrote to express our support for GNOME in an issue that affects the entire free software community. Today we make that support tangible.

"This is bigger than GNOME," said Debian Project Leader Sam Hartman. "By banding together and demonstrating that the entire free software community is behind GNOME, we can send a strong message to non-practicing entities (patent trolls). When you target anyone in the free software community, you target all of us. We will fight, and we will fight to invalidate your patent. For us, this is more than money. This is about our freedom to build and distribute our software."

"We're incredibly grateful to Debian for this kind donation, and also for their support," said Neil McGovern, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. "It's been heartening to see that when free software is attacked in this way we all come together on a united front."

If GNOME needs more money later in in this defense, Debian will be there to support the GNOME Foundation. We encourage individuals and organizations to join us and stand strong against patent trolls.

In 2012, the Debian Project published our Position on Software Patents, stating the threat that patents pose to Free Software.

The GNOME Foundation has announced recently that they are fighting a lawsuit alleging that Shotwell, a free and Open Source personal photo manager, infringes a patent.

The Debian Project firmly stands with the GNOME Foundation in their efforts to show the world that we in the Free Software communities will vigorously defend ourselves against any abuses of the patent system.

Please read this blog post about GNOME's defense against this patent troll and consider making a donation to the GNOME Patent Troll Defense Fund.

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Keng-Yu Lin (kengyu)
• Judit Foglszinger (urbec)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Hans van Kranenburg
• Scarlett Moore

Congratulations!