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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: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24 2017, @07:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24 2017, @07:22PM (#458217)

    why is the world so devoid of open hardware?
    Because to get into that world you need several million dollars of hardware and a phd in optics.

    For software you can use pretty much any computer made in the past 30 years and come up with something. You can than basically copy it a zillion times and still come out ahead.

    The cost structure for software vs hardware is not even close to being the same.

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  • (Score: 2) by cykros on Tuesday January 24 2017, @10:23PM

    by cykros (989) on Tuesday January 24 2017, @10:23PM (#458302)

    One thing that potentially could turn the tables here is if a Pirate Party (or similarly minded) controlled government saw fit to use government funds to subsidize open hardware in the name of bringing manufacturing jobs into their country. With enough demand from the privacy/tinkerer minded population it could be a measure that ultimately paid for itself with dividends in increased tax revenue, if executed correctly.

    We're certainly not there yet, but one can dream.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24 2017, @11:32PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24 2017, @11:32PM (#458325)

      Why don't we just FORCE people to see things our way, amirite?