Better late than never, we'd like to welcome our three Outreachy interns for this round, lasting from the 6th of December 2016 to the 6th of March 2017.

Elizabeth Ferdman is working in the Clean Room for PGP and X.509 (PKI) Key Management.

Maria Glukhova is working in Reproducible builds for Debian and free software.

Urvika Gola is working in improving voice, video and chat communication with free software.

From the official website: Outreachy helps people from groups underrepresented in free and open source software get involved. We provide a supportive community for beginning to contribute any time throughout the year and offer focused internship opportunities twice a year with a number of free software organizations.

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

Debian will also participate in the next round for Outreachy, during the summer of 2017. More details will follow in the next weeks.

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.

Congratulations, Elizabeth, Maria and Urvika!

We are very pleased to announce that Savoir-faire Linux has committed to support DebConf17 as a Platinum sponsor.

"Debian acts as a model for both Free Software and developer communities. Savoir-faire Linux promotes both vision and values of Debian. Indeed, we believe that it's an essential piece, in a social and political way, to the freedom of users using modern technological systems", said Cyrille Béraud, president of Savoir-faire Linux.

Savoir-faire Linux is a Montreal-based Free/Open-Source Software company with offices in Quebec City, Toronto, Paris and Lyon. It offers Linux and Free Software integration solutions in order to provide performance, flexibility and independence for its clients. The company actively contributes to many free software projects, and provides mirrors of Debian, Ubuntu, Linux and others.

Savoir-faire Linux was present at DebConf16 program with a talk about Ring, its GPL secure and distributed communication system. Ring package was accepted in Debian testing during DebCamp in 2016 and will be part of Debian Stretch. OpenDHT, the distributed hash table implementation used by Ring, also appeared in Debian experimental during last DebConf.

With this commitment as Platinum Sponsor, Savoir-faire Linux contributes to make possible our annual conference, and directly supports the progress of Debian and Free Software helping to strengthen the community that continues to collaborate on Debian projects throughout the rest of the year.

Thank you very much Savoir-faire Linux, for your support of DebConf17!

Become a sponsor too!

DebConf17 is still accepting sponsors. Interested companies and organizations may contact the DebConf team through sponsors@debconf.org, and visit the DebConf17 website at http://debconf17.debconf.org.

On February 4th and 5th, Debian will be attending FOSDEM 2017 in Brussels, Belgium; a yearly gratis event (no registration needed) run by volunteers from the Open Source and Free Software community. It's free, and it's big: more than 600 speakers, over 600 events, in 29 rooms.

This year more than 45 current or past Debian contributors will speak at FOSDEM: Alexandre Viau, Bradley M. Kuhn, Daniel Pocock, Guus Sliepen, Johan Van de Wauw, John Sullivan, Josh Triplett, Julien Danjou, Keith Packard, Martin Pitt, Peter Van Eynde, Richard Hartmann, Sebastian Dröge, Stefano Zacchiroli and Wouter Verhelst, among others.

Similar to previous years, the event will be hosted at Université libre de Bruxelles. Debian contributors and enthusiasts will be taking shifts at the Debian stand with gadgets, T-Shirts and swag. You can find us at stand number 4 in building K, 1 B; CoreOS Linux and PostgreSQL will be our neighbours. See https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEvents/be/2017/FOSDEM for more details.

We are looking forward to meeting you all!

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

• Karen M Sandler (karen)
• Sebastien Badia (sbadia)
• Christos Trochalakis (ctrochalakis)
• Adrian Bunk (bunk)
• Michael Lustfield (mtecknology)
• James Clarke (jrtc27)
• Sean Whitton (spwhitton)
• Jerome Georges Benoit (calculus)
• Daniel Lange (dlange)
• Christoph Biedl (cbiedl)
• Gustavo Panizzo (gefa)
• Gert Wollny (gewo)
• Benjamin Barenblat (bbaren)
• Giovani Augusto Ferreira (giovani)
• Mechtilde Stehmann (mechtilde)
• Christopher Stuart Hoskin (mans0954)

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

• Dmitry Bogatov
• Dominik George
• Gordon Ball
• Sruthi Chandran
• Michael Shuler
• Filip Pytloun
• Mario Anthony Limonciello
• Julien Puydt
• Nicholas D Steeves
• Raoul Snyman

Congratulations!

FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) are increasingly popular for data acquisition, device control and application acceleration. Debian now features a completely Free set of tools to program FPGA in Verilog, prepare the binary and have it executed on an affordable device.

See http://wiki.debian.org/FPGA/Lattice for details. Readers familiar with the technology may rightly guess that this refers to the yosys package together with berkeley-abc, arachne-"Place-and-Route" and the icestorm tools to communicate with the device.

The packages have been contributed by the Debian Science team.

We hope this effort to support the FPGA community to collect an increasing number of skills to further smoothen the Open Source experience and lower the entry barriers for this tantalising technology.