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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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It would save me a lot of time if you just gave up and went mad now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24 2017, @04:11AM
Read http://libv.livejournal.com/27461.html [livejournal.com] and weep. Companies and other coders sabotaging efforts. The rest of posts are also interesting.
We could had drivers for Mali GPUs, used in a lot of ARMs SoC, but no, the guy that was doing it (and that did a lot before like first Radeon efforts for "modern" cards at the time), got the "help" of people around. And you know, people need to pay bills and at some point they get pissed of being treated poorly. At least others had more luck, and now there is Adreno and others, inspired by Lima.
AMD/ATI also took a lot of effort to cross the hurdles. And Intel had to develop things their own way in Mesa. Better not talk about NVidia. Volunteers are helping with Beagle or Sunxi, because the companies don't seem to care about getting into upstream. So on and so forth. As pointed in other post, 2007 probably was peak moment (just before crisis, growth of "social" and all the rest of crap).
Few people left, and wasting their time is not a recipe for quick success or even slow improvement. Maybe if companies were liable for unpatched code, they would see the light and contribute back, instead of being one way "open". When someone proposes funding a legal case to even get respect for GPL, it seems too many say that is not going to work and that companies will run away (oh, great, don't sue, they do whatever they want, sue and they do it too). The thread did for Apple/ObjC in GCC. But with all the companies in bed of each other, kicking out any community representation, probably useless now. Lot's of GPL infrigement and increasing, even from members of Linux Fundation (AllWinner, eg).