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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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Could I have a drug overdose?
(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]