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Free Software Foundation Says We Need a Free Phone OS

posted by janrinok on Tuesday January 24 2017, @12:25AM   Printer-friendly

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

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

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday January 24 2017, @01:34AM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 24 2017, @01:34AM (#457888) Journal

    We were tricked though, when we thought that the phone belonged to the paying customer. In point of fact, Android phones belong to the telcos. The telcos do, indeed, do exactly what they want with the phones.

    Cyanogen mod was a decent answer to the telco's presumption. Unfortunately, cyanogen has sold out to those very same telcos.

    There's not much point in producing another OS, if the telcos claim ownership of that OS.

    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24 2017, @10:42AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24 2017, @10:42AM (#458032)

    do, indeed, do

    You almost said do-do.

    ...and Replicant keeps chugging along.
    I'm not ready to dismiss the little red robot. [google.com]

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