Free software to support the RARv3 archive format has been listed on our High Priority Projects list for some time now. We've always had ways to create and extract free archive formats, using tools like GNU tar and Info-ZIP. The RARv3 format is proprietary, so we don't want it to replace these tools, but it's not uncommon to see it used for distributing multimedia files over the Internet.

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA -- Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011 -- Free Software Foundation president Richard M. Stallman announced the winners of the FSF's annual free software awards at a ceremony on Saturday, March 19th, held during the LibrePlanet 2011 conference at Bunker Hill Community College.

GNU Radio had a pretty good year in 2010, and we are already on track for an even more productive year in 2011. While we only produced one release in 2010, a large amount of work went into our source repository to improve the quality and stability of the project, and we are on track for a new release soon that incorporates many of these fixes into a new stable release.

Must be a US citizen. The FSF is hiring a second Campaigns Manager to be part of a team that directs and coordinates our campaigns for software freedom. This is an opportunity to take a senior role in the organization that sponsors the GNU project, publishes the GNU GPL and works to promote the message that software freedom is a civil liberty.

FSF added a new project to High Priority Projects list: Writing free software drivers capable of 3D acceleration for the PowerVR engine. This is a critical project, because PowerVR is being used in many new and popular platforms, such as Android/Linux tablets and phones, and netbooks. Currently it requires proprietary drivers in order to access many video features.

Faced with a potentially large threat to free/libre and open source software from patent consortium CPTN, the two organisations have collaborated publicly for the first time. Before Christmas Open Source Initiative (OSI) wrote to the German Federal Cartel Office asking them to investigate the acquisition of Novell assets by the CPTN Group as a possibly anti-competitive move by CPTN's four members.

Last week, Google announced that it plans to remove support for the H.264 video codec from its browsers, in favor of the WebM codec that they recently made free. Since then, there's been a lot of discussion about how this change will affect the Web going forward, as HTML5 standards like the tag mature.