Geoffrey Knauth elected Free Software Foundation president; Odile Bénassy joins the board

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced the addition of a new director to its board, and the election of a new president. Long-time free software activist and developer Odile Bénassy, known especially for her work promoting free software in France, was elected to the FSF's board of directors. Geoffrey Knauth, who has served on the FSF's board for over thirty years, was elected president. On her election, Bénassy said, "I'm happy and proud to accept FSF's invitation to be part of the board. I want to help keep steady the principles of free software, and the philosophical values around it. Free software counts among what the world badly needs nowadays." Knauth welcomed Bénassy, saying, "I am delighted that Odile Bénassy has agreed to become a director of the FSF, FSF's first director from Europe. Odile is a mathematics educator, researcher, software engineer, and leader of the GNU Edu project. She has been advocating for and developing free software for more than twenty years." FSF's executive director, John Sullivan, added, "Being on the FSF's board of directors means first and foremost standing as a guardian for free software and the associated user freedoms. With such a long track record, Odile has shown herself to be someone FSF members and supporters can count on. I'm really looking forward to working with her, and I'm excited to see all the ways she'll help the FSF be better and stronger." Describing his approach to his new position as president, Knauth posted a statement which begins, "The FSF board chose me at this moment as a servant leader to help the community focus on our shared dedication to protect and grow software that respects our freedoms. It is also important to protect and grow the diverse membership of the community. It is through our diversity of backgrounds and opinions that we have creativity, perspective, intellectual strength and rigor."

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Review of Firefox “Fenix” for Android

Mozilla has begun a staged roll-out of its redesigned and rearchitected Firefox browser for Android (codename “Fenix”). So far, Fenix has only been released in 14 countries through the Google Play Store. Here’s my review of Mozilla’s new flagship mobile browser as a long-time user and as an extension developer. Fenix’s user interface is minimal, but it represents a large amount of work under the hood. It’s built on GeckoView and Mozilla Android Components (MOZAC); a set of reusable components for mobile app developers that makes it easier to build a web browser based on Mozilla technology. These components are a modernization of the old codebase as well as a direct competitor to WebView — the web engine that’s built-in to Android, as well as Google’s ChromiumView.

Interview: RISC-V CTO Mark Himelstein

RISC-V doesn’t have the necessary sacks of cash to spread around, however. The brute force approach is closed to Himelstein and his colleagues, so how does he motivate developers who might be on the fence? “I’m working on it,” he admits. “Look at Linux, at Hadoop, at Eclipse, at Apache… They grew up around the contributor model. Contributors to Hadoop are rock stars. It’s exciting. There’s cachet. It’s like being in an exclusive club. It’s hard to say how that happened. It just evolved.” He contrasts that process to seemingly similar open-source processors like OpenSPARC or OpenPower. Those examples are ex post facto open source, he says. They started out as proprietary commercial products (at Sun and IBM, respectively) and then backed into the open-source world after the fact. “They just hopped on the open-source train.” Nobody in those groups seems to have the same level of enthusiastic self-motivation that you see in, say, Hadoop or Linux circles, he says. “We want to be more like Linux or Hadoop.”