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

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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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by krishnoid on Tuesday January 24 2017, @02:34AM

    by krishnoid (1156) on Tuesday January 24 2017, @02:34AM (#457911)

    How about a libre operating system, hardware, and network that can, well, just place phone calls and exchange text messages? Or maybe that much already exists?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24 2017, @05:03AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24 2017, @05:03AM (#457950)

    Drop the text message requirement, et voilà! [wikipedia.org]

  • (Score: 2) by cockroach on Tuesday January 24 2017, @12:07PM

    by cockroach (2266) on Tuesday January 24 2017, @12:07PM (#458063)

    I would buy it, doesn't seem to exist though.

  • (Score: 2) by fubari on Tuesday January 24 2017, @08:26PM

    by fubari (4551) on Tuesday January 24 2017, @08:26PM (#458244)

    "GNU Heard" would be a good name for an open phone project.

    (for those that may not get the joke: GNU Hurd [wikipedia.org]

    excerpt: "Development of the Hurd has proceeded slowly. Despite an optimistic announcement by Stallman in 2002 predicting a release of GNU/Hurd later that year,[12] the Hurd is still not considered suitable for production environments.")