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The Free Software Foundation has published a new High Priority Projects list, the document it uses to highlight "a relatively small number of projects of great strategic importance to the goal of freedom for all computer users."
By publishing the list, the Foundation hopes to guide volunteers towards what it feels are the most impactful projects as the organisation pursues its goal to encourage development and use of free software that users can "run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve".
This year's list adds the following projects, presented in the no-particular-order chosen by the Foundation:
- Free phone operating system – probably the Replicant Android distribution, in order to bring free software to today's most common personal computing device
- Free personal assistant – A free Siri/Cortana/Alexa clone, perhaps based on Lucida or Mycroft (which last week emerged as a disk image for the Raspberry Pi)
- Decentralization, federation, and personal clouds – an attempt to federate web services so that users can see their data from multiple services in one place. Imagine one photo library spanning all the stuff you have in Facebook, Google and that old Flickr account and you'll get the idea
- Encourage contribution by people underrepresented in the community – Probably through the Outreachy project
- Accessibility and internationalization – So that everyone can use free software
- Free software adoption by governments – both as user and through code-sharing efforts like code.gov
- Free drivers, firmware, and hardware designs – The foundation wants "manufacturers to publish designs for hardware under free licenses" but will settle for the release of "key technical specifications sufficient to write free drivers for their hardware." If they won't cooperate at all, then we'll have to reverse engineer the needed support."
[Continues...]
A few projects also dropped off the list, namely:
- Gnash, the free software Flash player
- Free software video editing software
- Free Google Earth replacement
- Free software replacement for Oracle Forms
- Automatic transcription
- Free software replacement for Bittorrent Sync
- GNU Octave, free software Matlab replacement
- Replacement for OpenDWG libraries
- Reversible debugging in GDB
- Free software drivers for network routers
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Free Software Foundation Says We Need a Free Phone OS
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Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy
based on excellence of performance. -- James Bryant Conant
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24 2017, @12:57AM
Even the most open mobile platforms are still steaming piles of binary blobs.
Were there a mobile platform that is actually amenable to tinkering, then hackers would have already cobbled together a libre operating system for it! Alas, not only have such platforms become less hackable over the years, but so too have the "traditional" PCs.
The libre software movement was at its zenith in 2007, and then the iPhone appeared; the movement has been suffocating ever since, drowned in the drivel of script kiddies looking to make a buck in the walled gardens of the hardware industry's overlords—an entire generation of developers has been cultivated not to care about their own freedoms.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24 2017, @01:18AM
Its the meatware layer where the problem lies today. The FSF have lost their way. Stallman does just that - he's a man that stalls - on progress and just says the same 12 words that make up the bulk his limited vocabulary, on repeat, forever. All their "projects" are irrelevant. GNU was herding nowhere until Linus T showed up (what incredible luck) and we have Linux. Other than that one real product, little to zero has emerged from the FSF and Stallman apart from ten trillion gallons of hot air and rhetoric.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Arik on Tuesday January 24 2017, @01:29AM
For one thing, if Linus hadn't come along, we would have have GNU-BSD. It would have been several months later, but it would certainly exist.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Uncle_Al on Tuesday January 24 2017, @01:36AM
Woot!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24 2017, @01:59AM
:) No Linus? Then we would still be waiting (in 2017) for the hot air to materialize an actual OS you could use. GNunix would be right along ReactOS - a poor beta, miles from version 1.0.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24 2017, @10:15AM
...or maybe we'd be discussing KolibriOS. [google.com]
Well, then again, they do currently take a particular pride in how small that is.
Kolibri is Russian for Hummingbird. [google.com]
...and, not so long ago, you could run the whole deal from a floppy.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday January 25 2017, @09:19AM
Thanks for that link!
I found this [techradar.com] while researching your link.
Ten more tiny OS.
I find other OS interesting as someday I may need something far simpler for inclusion in dedicated systems, and may not agree with whats demanded in the EULAs or leave myself so wide open to well known exploits.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 25 2017, @07:36PM
found this
Grrrr. Techradar.
Guys that spread small amounts of content over multiple web pages irritate me almost as much as bozos who try to put their entire site on 1 page. 8-|
KolibriOS has gotten larger with its most recent release but, the time before that, it was still floppy-sized.
Impressive for what-all it does.
You've reminded me of Blueflops, a floppy-based distro from a decade ago.
You would boot to the first floppy, which loads the kernel, then put in the 2nd floppy to run the apps.
Googling for it, [google.com] I found this page.
A Linux Distribution under 8MB RAM? [stackexchange.com]
(AsheeshR mentions Blueflops but seems to have missed the bullet point he meant to include for it.)
.
Trying my archived bookmark fails. [softpedia.com]
Softpedia revamped their site a while back, so that could be the reason it's gone.
Blueflops uses/used Kernel 2.4, so that could be another reason for its disappearance.
The Wayback Machine has exactly one copy of the page. [archive.org]
(The Download page isn't archived, however.)
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Tuesday January 24 2017, @12:14PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Tuesday January 24 2017, @10:44AM
> we would have have GNU-BSD
Under _what_ licence ????
(Score: 3, Informative) by cykros on Tuesday January 24 2017, @10:11PM
Considering how permissive the BSD license is, I'd say that the FSF would have packaged the GNU userland with a BSD kernel and slapped it all together with a GPL license. If Apple can call Darwin proprietary, the GPL would be equally available as an option.
Now, whether or not the masses would have opted for that route when other BSD's were available is a matter for endless speculation, and it probably boils down to whether or not a killer app arose in the GNU userland that was missing in the BSD licensed world (much like how OS X won over so many people with the proprietary elements as to get them paying for a system with a freely available kernel).
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday January 25 2017, @01:31AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bob_super on Tuesday January 24 2017, @01:59AM
Additionally: The problem is LIFE CYCLE.
Once upon a time, IBM said: you'll be able to interchange components, but the fundamentals will remain the same. That gave time to develop driver solutions.
Right now, a phone sells for 6 months to a year, then the next one will have different components. There is a lot of internal compatibility, because the manufacturers are not stupid. But there are many ways in which each generation will be significantly different from the previous one. Good luck writing your own drivers to address all the combos...
Silver lining: The always-new is starting to slow down. I another 3 to 5 years, there might just be more stability, as people already have more power in their pocket than they need. That's when we get a chance to see a volunteer effort produce results...
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Tuesday January 24 2017, @07:20AM
Silver lining: The always-new is starting to slow down. I another 3 to 5 years, there might just be more stability, as people already have more power in their pocket than they need.
The trouble is that commercial interests have gotten so used to people trding in for a new phone every year or two. They'll expend all their effort to maintain that revenue stream, persuading people that this next phone is so much better...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24 2017, @09:22AM
Well, there was a time where your PC was old after a few years. The last PC I stopped using was 9 years old, and the only reason I no longer use it is because I bricked it in a failed BIOS update. Up to then I was using it as my main computer.