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The FSF Is Looking To Update Its High Priority Free Software Projects List
As we roll into 2021 the Free Software Foundation is looking to update its high priority free software projects list. These are the software projects that should be incorporating "the most important threats, and most critical opportunities, that free software faces in the modern computing landscape." For now the FSF is looking for help deciding what to include.
[...] Currently on the list are different "areas" they feel are high priority for free software as opposed to previously focusing on particular projects:
- Free phone operating system
- Decentralization, federation, and self-hosting
- Free drivers, firmware, and hardware designs
- Real-time voice and video chat
- Encourage contribution by people underrepresented in the community
- Internationalization of free software
- Security by and for free software
- Intelligent personal assistant
- Help GNU/Linux distributions be committed to freedom
- Free software adoption by governments
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The FSF is Looking to Update its High Priority Free Software Projects List
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Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.
-- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
(Score: 5, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday October 30 2020, @01:42AM (14 children)
FSF was a joke when RMS founded it and got steadily less funny. Throwing the founder out for not being woke enough was the exact point in its existence that it stepped beyond clownshoes ridiculous though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 30 2020, @02:08AM
"Push CoCsucking" being merely the 5th instead of all 10 cannot be tolerated anymore!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 30 2020, @03:23AM
https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/gnuemacs.en.html [gnu.org]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 30 2020, @03:35AM (1 child)
"FSF was a joke when RMS founded it..."
The whole point of FSF back then was, you buy a hardware, an equipment, you should be free to do whatever you want with it. And software is the means to do what you want to do with it.
But ridonculous copyright/patents laws got in the way. That's why GPL was cooked up.
As ugly as RMS is (take a shower and shave), the man and FSF ...
Fuck it. The West, or at least the Murca, is done for.
Learn Mandarin.
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday October 30 2020, @03:53AM
If that's all you know of the FSF, you can be forgiven your incorrect notions of its validity and utility. There's a lot more to it and most of it is retarded.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by barbara hudson on Friday October 30 2020, @01:32PM (6 children)
From TFA, because who RTFA nowadays:
Their previous high priority list included gnash (flash replacement). They're really stuck in a combination of a time warp (flash???) and Dunning-Kruger. Nobody should take anything they say seriously. Like their campaign to get Microsoft to open-source Windows 7, this list has zero relevance today.
Notice anything missing from this list? Like a stable funding model for developers? Show them the money, developers will code. But foundations only want to finance their own bureaucrats jobs. And let's be honest, even a village idiot can do boosterism without any technical knowledge of what they're pushing.
The best things in life are free,
you can tell that to the birds and bees,
I want money, that's what I want
That's what I wa-a-ant, that's what I want.
Because developers gotta eat at least as much as the people running the FSF. Check out their financial statements - their staff don't work for free. Fucking hypocrites.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 30 2020, @05:39PM (5 children)
How to solve the funding problem:
Pay developers a stipend for having a GitHub account. Pay developers bonuses by how many meme images they post to issue trackers on GitHub. Pay developers to post images on GitHub because GitHub is a social network image board for fake fucks who don't code.
Money or no money, developers are shit people.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday October 30 2020, @06:06PM (4 children)
Like the toll booths that stay open long after the highway is paid, to pay for operating the toll booths.
The FSF could disappear tomorrow and the only thing that would change as no self-promotional stories about bullshit. Because that's all their campaign to free Windows 7 was - they knew it was impossible even if Microsoft wanted to because Microsoft doesn't own the rights to all the code.
Same as this list changes nothing. Same as the previous lists are filled with projects that have been abandoned or aren't going anywhere. The FSF has become just one more group of self-important nobodies making a living off gullible donors.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 31 2020, @12:01AM (1 child)
And, Barbara Hudson says this, so either it is true, or it is self-referential. Difficult to know which.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday October 31 2020, @01:56AM
What I wrote must be true according to your logic because I don't get paid for all/any of my volunteer work, so it's not self-referential.
What was the purpose of this list? To justify some jobs at the FSF, end of story. Because these lists of important projects have zero effect, as shown by reading the article and the link to another article that describes the lack of results for the previous list.
So those who blindly support this behaviour are freetards.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 31 2020, @09:54AM (1 child)
stop talking shit about people you,ve never met, you jerk.
fsf brought me connections to many hackers of good intentions, many interesting talks.
all i had to do is volunteer, probably more than all the critics in this thread have done.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday October 31 2020, @03:54PM
So you had to work for free to get any connections. I just printed up business cards de and banged on company doors to find what they needed and how much they were willing to pay.
You're at a disadvantage if the client knows you're willing to give away your professional skills in return for free publicity - don't be surprised if potential clients try the same shit - "do this for us and you'll get to use us a a client reference "
I don't mind volunteering my time - but not my professional skills. Why should I undercut others that way? And who needs the headache of supporting something you gave away for free , because they'll expect support to be free as well.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 30 2020, @07:13PM (2 children)
Nearly everything we have that is good in technology was either sourced from or influenced by the FSF / RMS / GNU.
Even the BSDs have a free license due to lobbying by RMS when he would visit Berkley. The BSD folks didn't go far enough in protecting the user's freedom as RMS would have liked, but they went with a free license instead of a proprietary one-- you have RMS to thank for that.
RMS was directly responsible for influential projects like gcc and emacs.
And, nearly every public server on the Internet is running GPL software, as is nearly every phone capable of running a web browser, on the planet, as are nearly every super computer etc. If you think FSF/GNU/RMS have not had reach, you haven't been paying attention.
Your own exposure to the tech world should provide enough evidence for you to conclude for yourself that your statement is complete nonsense.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday October 30 2020, @09:30PM
GNU absolutely did some useful things. So did RMS, even if he is pretty kooky. The FSF is a waste of anyone who's ever donated to them's money though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday October 31 2020, @12:08AM
The original Turbo Pascal was also written in assembler, no libc required. So were many of the tools and programs, including (of course) BASIC. Ditto many of the games.
None of this was due to RMS. And when c compilers became cheap , they depended on their own libc and libraries independent of anything RMS did.
The desktop PC revolution was independent of anything that RMS was involved in - he was basically living for free (squatting) in the university computer labs in his ivory tower of academia while the real world built the microcomputer industry completely without him.
That's one of the reasons he hates closed systems - he missed the revolution. Everything from the 8-bit micros to the IBM PC was alien to him and his ethos - but the shear quantity of software, as well as quality, for those early systems beat anything FOSS could match.
And FOSSils never caught up. Up until 2005 it seemed that FOSS would inevitably win in the long run: after all, how can you compete with free?
But in retrospect it was obvious that FOSS cannot muster the numbers of developers willing to work on free software that proprietary software can generate.
Follow the story links to the previous "important list of software" - nothing achieved, nobody stepping forward to help make it happen. Or look at the Linux console driver and Linus saying maybe it's time to drop it because there's nobody to maintain it.
Or xorg now being abandonware, again because nobody is maintaining it.
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(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 30 2020, @02:14AM (1 child)
EVER SHOVE A BURGER UP YOUR BUTT ONLY TO DISCOVER IT HAD METH IN IT?
I JUST HAD SEX WITH A BUCKET OF CHICKEN!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday October 30 2020, @03:51AM
Regular or extra crispy?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday October 30 2020, @03:23AM (9 children)
FSF/GNU was always lagging in technology behind leading industry. But technology lag is not a direct cause of its failure, for example perfectionist Apple is lagging in technology quite intentionally and does well.
The weakest point of GNU and FSF was always... politics. And their adversaries noticed it well.
Now, FSF is disrupted successfully by joined political and personal effort of predatory agencies and corporations.
Conclusively, I can predict: There will be no future success for FSF/GNU by just focusing on particular listed technology while staying ignorant to destructive politics of corporate clique puppeteering it. There is an analogy in history: GNU was like Revolution, initial transformative success, but current situation of FSF is the Contra-Revolution, a regressive recoil.
Progress can be provided by incorruptible individuals, not by spoiled organizations.
The epoch has changed. Maybe a new revolutionary organization is needed.
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 30 2020, @06:51AM (8 children)
No new revolution is needed. People woke up to the fact that GPL is a trap by design. It's like RMS took the first derivative of copyright, set it to zero and solved, thinking that it was the peak when in reality it's a trough. If your software rolls in to that trough, it will eventually stay there.
More people are getting turned on to the idea that software works best with an interplay between open and proprietary. By pulling software permanently in to the open position and keeping it there, you guarantee that it will eventually be deprived of that interplay and suffer somehow. It can go on for decades, like Linux; but there's an eventuality that comes.
It all falls in line with the fact that their politics is couched in socialism. It works for a while, then become moribund. Eventually, the USSR has you standing in line for inferior products, and living a lower standard of living. Eventually, the FSF can only produce lists of what it wants do do. Stand in line, comrade, for this list of things to be produced. You might get your Trabant before the USSR collapses. You might not.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by unauthorized on Friday October 30 2020, @10:13AM (3 children)
What an incredibly dumb thing to say. You will never have to "stand in line" for data because data is inherently infinite supply product without artificial restrictions such as copyright laws and DRM. Even if a zombie appocalypse happened tomorrow and all software development ceased, the software won't just disappear into oblivion except maybe all the proprietary crapware that relies on online activation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 30 2020, @04:09PM (2 children)
I'm the AC to which you're replying. You're not standing in line for "data". You're standing in line for developer effort. How's that HURD OS coming along?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 30 2020, @04:41PM (1 child)
Linux became big and professional. GNU became a hobby.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday October 30 2020, @06:15PM
And then it was co-opted by IBM via Redhat, same as MySQL, OpenOffice, and Java were taken over by Oracle, etc. Sure there are replacements, but the consumer doesn't want any of them.
Foundation? Look at how Mozilla managed to pretty much kill off Firefox and that's the future of all foundations devoted to free software - ditching the software to concentrate on survival. Because the #1 item that should be on the list - stable funding - is only possible if you get co-opted by business, who then ensures that the emphasis is on their needs, not the general good.
Just look at Chromebooks and their spyware.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 30 2020, @05:09PM (2 children)
> More people are getting turned on to the idea that software works best with an interplay between open and proprietary.
So who are you shilling for?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 31 2020, @08:21AM (1 child)
Same, AC again. Absolutely nobody. I'm pretty much retired, dumbass; but if I'm shilling for anybody, it's developers in general. Would you rather have the choice of going proprietary with something BSD-licensed, or be stuck on the GNU commune forever?
Seriously, the Left has lost its mind. Remember when being Left meant you supported labor? Now they want developers to work for nothing permanently--the internship that never ends. Don't give me that BS about how you can still sell Free Software. It's never going to match the revenue stream of proprietary, or the choice of BSD-style licenses. The FSF is like the worst union that labor ever had!
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday October 31 2020, @04:30PM
RMS, ESR, and the rest are elitists, not lefties. Dyed in the wool libertarians who believe in Ayn Rand and social Darwinism. The funny thing is that their antisocial views and need for control over others (The FreeBSD license is too free, proprietary software is morally and ethically wrong, work for the collective - OUR collective - for free) has resulted in a stagnant open source with the only way to get your project supported is to let it be co-opted by business.
So they enabled the surveillance technology we live in today. Thanks for nothing!
In every other line of human endeavour, working for money to pay the bills is seen as a moral imperative. Software is no different. Unless you're holding a gun to your clients head, selling them a license to use your software while you keep the source to yourself is perfectly moral and ethical. Both sides understand the nature of the transaction, both sides receive a valuable consideration that makes the deal wiorth it to them.'
Whether it's selling a bag of oranges or a software license, it's up to the vendor to set the price, and the consumer either to accept the deal, haggle over the price and terms, look elsewhere, or plant their own orange tree/write their own sod.
Look at the end result - the abandonware, the projects that can't attract developers because it's not worth the hassle.
How's Perl 6 (aka Parrot) doing (cue up Monty Python dead parrot skit). So bad a fiasco that the replacement which would have been Perl 7 abandoned the goals and changed its name and still isn't going anywhere in terms of displacing Perl 5.
Xorg is abandonware.
The Linux console is abandonware, at least according to Linus.
Firefox? From 28% market share to 2%. Developers laid off but have the "opportunity" to work for free.
Not a single Linux distro has a decent screen reader. So much for accessibility.
The various distros differentiate themselves by twiddling the UI. Because actually creating new programs isn't worth it if everyone else can just copy/fork them. -
The GPL is anti-coder. Which is why it's stagnant, and the App stores are bringing in more than $50 billion a year.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 30 2020, @05:27PM
fuck you, goddamned Suited Whore!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Friday October 30 2020, @03:31AM (38 children)
Is a "phone" nowadays a touchscreen computer, just guaranteed to include a cellular modem [sic] for voice and data? Do they differ in any way at all, even on a technicality?
(Score: 3, Informative) by coolgopher on Friday October 30 2020, @03:41AM (7 children)
Well, it's typically a pain to build from source on a phone or a tablet, with them lacking both toolchains and developer environments.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by barbara hudson on Friday October 30 2020, @02:16PM (4 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Friday October 30 2020, @10:02PM (3 children)
Well I can't ssh from my workstation into my dev phone/tablet to compile there...
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday October 31 2020, @12:15AM (2 children)
You can ssh from your phone to your work station. I don't know about Android, but the Apple App Store has various ssh tools available. If you don't like what is on offer, feel free to write your own.
Would probably be better on an iPad, if only for the larger screen and keyboard accessories. But it's definitely doable.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Saturday October 31 2020, @01:57AM (1 child)
You're missing the point here. For phone/tablet == pc, what is possible on PC should also be possible on phone/pc. I'm pointing out that there are no toolchains and supporting build tools (e.g. make) that you run natively on your phone/tablet. If a phone/tablet was no different than a PC, then it follows that I should be able to SSH from my workstation into my phone/tablet and do my development directly on the phone/tablet, just as it is currently possible (though a bit painful) to SSH from your phone/tablet into your workstation to do development on the workstation.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday October 31 2020, @12:55PM
But if you want an argument, here - most of what passes for development is shitty web pages, and you can edit and test them right on your phone.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Saturday October 31 2020, @01:20AM (1 child)
Maybe not full toolchains, but clang [stackexchange.com] is available. And I can't see a good reason why powerful enough hardware shouldn't be able to self-host Android, at least for app creation.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Saturday October 31 2020, @02:00AM
Good start! I had not come across this before - thanks. I'm not holding my breath for Xcode on an iPhone though.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Friday October 30 2020, @03:46AM (9 children)
You need to add a size requirement to your definition. There is a push to get 5G modems into laptops/desktops [soylentnews.org], and laptops/2-in-1s can have touchscreens.
Also, the Ubuntu Edge [wikipedia.org] vision of plugging a smartphone into a dock/monitor and having a Linux desktop has been here [soylentnews.org] for a while. Samsung Dex has enabled an Android desktop. Now you see 8-16 GB of RAM in smartphones, probably 20-24 GB on the horizon, and decent enough ARM 8-cores (far more powerful than RPi4) with "desktop-class" ~3 GHz Cortex-X1 [soylentnews.org] cores coming soon.
Is anyone taking non-VoIP calls on a laptop?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday October 30 2020, @12:24PM (8 children)
> Is anyone taking non-VoIP calls on a laptop?
Not me. It's a mess. Lack of phone numbers, or some other means of finding and connecting, is one of the downfalls of free VoIP. Another is that you really should have a dedicated device. Smartphones are phones 1st, cameras 2nd, and app platforms 3rd. On a laptop system it's not so clear that a phone call should have priority.
We should have better communication. As usual, it's the service providers and their, uh, phony rules (pun intended). The pricing of text messaging has no relationship at all to the far, far smaller quantity of data it takes as compared to voice. That 140 character limit is so bogus.
Software alone can't fix these problems. Sometimes, the FSF acts as if coming up with, for example, an IPv7 could somehow bring down the price of broadband so that everyone really can get connected.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday October 30 2020, @12:49PM (3 children)
We need to expand the address space again. IPv6 is not enough for every quark to have a subnet.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 30 2020, @04:42PM (1 child)
Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he hasn't got much of a bark.
And sure any he has it's all beside the mark.
But with a subnet of his own, his gluons can SYN/ACK.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 30 2020, @06:20PM
Sign this document which certifies Mister Musk owns Mars. The entire planet.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Saturday October 31 2020, @01:15AM
And good luck if you want inter-multiverse quark-to-quark routing. I sure hope they plan the address space expansion better this time.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 30 2020, @05:21PM (3 children)
> The pricing of text messaging has no relationship at all to the far, far smaller quantity of data it takes as compared to voice. That 140 character limit is so bogus.
I'm one of the holdouts that doesn't have a cell phone, land line works fine for me (I have used these phones, sometimes borrow one for a trip or something). However, it's handy to be able to send/receive texts, some of my friends live on their phone. Since I've already bent over for the Goog/Gmail, I use the free Google Voice service too. Google gave me a phone number and it works for texting, worldwide. Every now and then a text won't be "instant", but the failure rate is pretty low.
At one point I looked at using Google Voice (for voice calls) with a headset on my laptop, but it didn't seem worth it. When I get VOIP calls (on my land line), they are often terrible voice quality, sometimes not comprehensible. For business calls (which I do make), having the distraction of a garbled connection is terrible, thus the land line.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday October 30 2020, @10:06PM (2 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Saturday October 31 2020, @01:26AM (1 child)
Ting's service [ting.com] provides tiered a-la-carte-like rates. Not sure how valuable it is in general, but it's useful for some people.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday October 31 2020, @02:05AM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday October 30 2020, @05:19AM (10 children)
I'd love a phone with AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT. From a distance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday October 30 2020, @12:54PM (5 children)
AFAIK eGPUs are in limbo because GPU docks are expensive and the GPUs advance faster than the cable max bandwidth can. But streaming games from PC to phone should be doable.
Phones and standalone VR headsets might be able to reach the performance of a 6900 XT if we go full 3D.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday October 30 2020, @01:05PM (4 children)
At 300W TDP, I ... shudders... wonder what's the weight of the battery required by a phone with a Radeon 6900 GPU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Friday October 30 2020, @01:14PM (3 children)
In all seriousness, AMD Radeon graphics based on some version of RDNA is coming to Samsung smartphones.
https://www.sammobile.com/news/amd-gpu-for-2021-samsung-flagships-impresses-in-first-leak/ [sammobile.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday October 30 2020, @01:27PM (2 children)
(Oh, gosh. I'm gonna have to strain my grinning muscles)
Thanks, informative, but it so happens it is irrelevant to me. I don't intend to buys Samsung, on reasons of scroogeness when it comes to buying gizmos I rarely use.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Saturday October 31 2020, @02:02AM (1 child)
Go on, treat yourself to something useless after a shit year :D
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday October 31 2020, @02:40AM
Paid a bit over AUD300 each of the Lenovo-s. Would I have gone with a Samsung, I would have to pay more than for the two I picked instead. More than half a year down the road, they are working absolutely fine, no difference from when I first started them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday October 31 2020, @01:07PM (3 children)
Then again, I was waiting for a blood test at the hospital a couple of months ago and one guy in his late 30s - asshole (nice suit, self-important attitude, took off his mask so he could talk on his phone. A fucking FLIP PHONE!!! Guess he had spent all his money dressing to impress and cultivating that tired fake it til you make it meme.
There's a reason flip phones still exist - they're now called seniors phones, for people who can't see well enough to use a smartphone.
I have one from more than a decade ago - charged it up yesterday. Makes a great small light portable radio for work. And if it gets broken who cares?
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday October 31 2020, @01:33PM (2 children)
Until 3 years ago, I was using a good old Nokia 3310, never needed much else. I bought a smartphone only when the office IT told me I can't work remotely without a one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday October 31 2020, @04:46PM
The only people I actually talk to by phone are my sisters and medical appointments/telemedicine. Everyone else is text and maybe a couple of emails a year.
And banking using the interactive phone system because both their web site and app are buggy Java on the server that keeps logging people out (not just me). They've really gone downhill the last 5 years.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 01 2020, @02:18AM
Flip phones are actually making a comeback in many professional circles. Much longer battery life, much more rugged, no incessant emails, less exposure if lost, auxiliary devices are widely available if needed, less FOMO and bombardment, and big screens and fancy apps aren't necessary if you aren't going to use them anyway.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Pino P on Friday October 30 2020, @05:49AM (2 children)
The difference is that a phone's boot process and operating system are engineered for reliability more than for flexibility. The free software movement is all about flexibility, also known as freedom, including the freedom to shoot yourself in whatever appendage you have. By contrast, the vast majority of people buying a phone want something they can depend on as an appliance to make and receive voice calls.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by legont on Friday October 30 2020, @10:14AM
For the last 15 years or so my Linux computers were more reliable than my phones. Just saying.
In fact I still have my Thinkpad vintage 2000 running. It makes and receives phone calls just fine as well.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday October 30 2020, @08:47PM
I think the vast majority of (post-millennial) people buying a "phone" infrequently use them for voice calls. There's also a handful of developed nations, where it's semi-rude to talk at a conversational level about your private business in public, and less developed nations, lacking noise ordinances for small outdoor appliances/transportation/industrial operations where it's difficult to hear anything on the phone when you're out and about.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 30 2020, @07:38AM (2 children)
Not really. We have the technology to effectively replace laptops with smartphones. High-end phone hardware is plenty fast enough for almost everything you'd want to do on a laptop (including playing Morrowind at 1080p 60fps). Just imagine a scenario where your phone runs a full-blown Linux distro, and all you have to do is plug your phone into a laptop dock or a desktop USB-C dock, and everything runs through that. Hell, the Pixel 2 I have is almost there, but doesn't support video out over USB-C. It even connects fine to the wired networking plugged into the dock.
There is too much money to be made however from selling incremental upgrades to consumers who buy and associate with brands and products. Why sell one expensive device every year when you can sell three instead?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday October 30 2020, @09:52AM
With further development of x86 emulation + WINE or Nintendo Switch emulation, you could probably play Skyrim on a Linux ARM smartphone.
As a bit of a kludge, you can use scrcpy [wikipedia.org] to mirror an Android smartphone's screen onto a desktop PC. I use it to connect one to a Raspberry Pi 4. It takes keyboard and mouse input (to the extent that the phone recognizes it; some keyboard shortcuts won't work).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday October 31 2020, @12:26AM
Others also made systems that you could plug your phone into a dock and use the docks larger display and keyboard/mouse.
They were pretty much killed by the iPad.
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(Score: 2) by toddestan on Friday October 30 2020, @11:05PM (2 children)
The big difference between what I call a computer and a phone is that the computer is an open device that I have control over. I have root. I can install my own OS, create software for it, etc. Phones are closed devices. Some are more closed than others (like iOS), and some phones can be hacked so that you install your own OS, but none are as open as a PC.
Phones are more like a portable gaming console that can make calls and receive texts than a computer.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday October 31 2020, @01:13PM (1 child)
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(Score: 2) by toddestan on Saturday October 31 2020, @04:51PM
I agree. The current state of laptops is pretty sad nowadays. Though the better ones (i.e. not Chromebooks or Macs) still allow you to install your own OS.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by legont on Friday October 30 2020, @10:30AM (1 child)
My dream world is I have a device that runs Linux. It has neither keys no screen of any kind. Just a black bulletproof box. I walk with it next to a screen with a keyboard and my box takes it over for me to use.
Now let me scream. Why after so many years the only thing that works is Bluetooth and it works half of the time at most? Why my bloody car loses contact with my phone every months? Why does it takes minutes to handshake?
Can somebody come up with something that just works all the time? I am willing to spend any time working with both devices, setting keys or whatever, but after that it should always work forever ever till I am dead.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday October 30 2020, @06:19PM
Take a laptop with a broken screen, remove the motherboard, put the motherboard in a case of your own making (all the main components are soldered to the motherboard), and off you go. So what's stopping you?
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 30 2020, @02:10PM (1 child)
Therefore the highest priority project should be making free clones of everything SpaceX.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday October 30 2020, @10:09PM
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(Score: 2) by Rich on Friday October 30 2020, @03:39PM
Not even a pink unicorn pony on the wish list. Can it get more modest than they are?
I'll save my precious time to rant here. But I gave the anjuta and ekiga sites a look to see how these key projects to their list come along. "Maintenance Mode" puts it friendly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 30 2020, @05:38PM
They are not underrepresented in the community, and by "encourage contribution", if you're like EndlessOS and GNOME you probably really mean discriminating against cis-gendered, white males (even innocent kids, because no whites can be innocent), no matter how poor they are. Enjoy it while you can, Bolshevik Jews' Useful Idiots, because we won't be as easily murdered like you murdered the White Russians. We are well armed and waking up to your global White Genocide. Justice will come for you like the undead rider in the night.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday October 30 2020, @05:47PM (2 children)
Perhaps poorly chosen wording; I suspect they really do not want free malware.
-- hendrik
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 30 2020, @06:14PM (1 child)
Isn't it great how you can get malware for free but anti-malware will cost you? So who has the better business model that allows to give away product for free? The malware companies or the anti-malware companies?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 30 2020, @08:23PM
Your argument is invalid. Just about every AV is or has some flavor of free today, including one that is FLOSS.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Friday October 30 2020, @07:49PM (4 children)
Sure, it seems antiquated. Sure, not everything they do is everybody's cup of tea. But here are some things that have been true about their work for the last 35+ years, and will remain true if they don't radically screw things up:
1. Their projects make the vast majority of Linux boxes out there tick. Try living without GCC, Glibc, and all the other utility programs they control. Without them, Linux would not have been any more than a toy when Linus first released it.
2. People are still maintaining those projects.
3. So far at least, nobody has been able to take their code and put it into a proprietary box. And not for lack of trying - they've had to do quite a bit of GPL enforcement over the years.
All of this is exactly what RMS et al wanted to accomplish when they started the FSF. And that should be praised.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday October 31 2020, @01:42PM (3 children)
Other operating systems manage to do without glibc. Historically, you didn't even need a c compiler - the hobby computers that started the user revolution didn't have one, it was all in assembler. Same when the PC came along. When c compilers came to the PC, none of them were based off gcc - they were all proprietary. Same as the libraries.
RMS missed the small computing/home computing revolution. The Commodore 64s, the Tandy Colour Computers, even the Timex Sinclair, did more to get the computer market going than anything from RMS, free software, gcc, or glib. Who needs a c compiler when everyone was writing everything in assembler for speed and compactness?
In the early 90s there were half a dozen inexpensive c compilers for the PC, plus a few really expensive ones. None of them had anything to do with BSD, gcc, glib, or RMS.
Nobody took their code and put it into proprietary systems because nobody wanted it. They were too busy making money selling their own code.
Even today the number of developers working on proprietary code that gets sold over and over, paying their wages, far outstrips the entire open source universe. And the selection of proprietary software absolutely swamps free software. Compare, for example, the amount of software in the average Linux distro with the App Store. No wonder that between the App Store and Play Store there's more than 5 million apps. Sure, most are crap, but the same can be said for most open source software. But the combined revenue of the two stores of more than $50 billion a year means that there's lots that people are willing to pay for. You can't even give Linux away.
Xorg is abandonware even though many pieces of free software still use it. Nobody is willing to maintain it for free. What's happening with the console driver? Is that going to be dropped because of a lack of maintainers?
And games? Even the old flash games were better than the average FOSS game.
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(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday October 31 2020, @07:15PM (2 children)
I don't buy the "Back in my day ..." argument: I was there for a lot of it, and family members were in the tech business in punch-card and tape-storage mainframe era.
Yes, a lot of people were writing raw assembler, especially before the early 70's with the creation of the C programming language, although there was also plenty of partisans for compiled languages like Fortran and Cobol as well. C gained steam pretty steadily from its release through the 1990's for writing system software and even a lot of consumer applications, and not just because Unix systems came with all the tools you needed to write C but because it was far better than assembler code (and if you've ever wrangled assembler, as I have, you'll understand exactly what I mean) but you could drop into assembler when you needed to. MS Windows and some of the classic MacOS code was written in C as well.
And yes, throughout the 80's, what the FSF was mostly writing for were minicomputer Unix environments common at universities, with tools that were eventually viable alternatives to the proprietary Unix tools released by people like Sun Microsystems. Then in 1993, Linus releases the Linux kernel, soon under GPL, and some of those folks realized that if you combined the Linux kernel with all the system software the FSF had been working on for a Unix environment, all of a sudden you had working system made up of GPL'd code. And the result was that they took over what had been the proprietary Unix space within about 10 years. And the reason was that people wanted it. And after another 15 years, Linux + FSF's userspace is dominating so thoroughly in server-space that even Microsoft is looking for a way to play nice while Apple is mostly trying to keep its users happy with the BSD-based OS X.
I also can't help but notice that your whole post seems more interested in what is profitable rather than what is useful. Those two things aren't always the same thing.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday October 31 2020, @09:39PM
Eventually almost everyone bought the AT&T spec for C++ 3.0. Borland was able to implement it well before Microsoft, again no FOSS GPL code, because there was no GPL C++ 3.0 at the time - it simply didn't exist.
And it's still not needed by the vast majority of computer users, who don't use Linux, so don't give a shit about Linux or RMS.
For anyone who wants something open, FreeBSD is better anyway. No license hassles, way less fragmentation, so in an alternate universe where RMS didn't exist nothing changes. Proprietary software still wins.
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(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday October 31 2020, @09:54PM
Just ask the 250 laid-off Firefox devs . They've already dropped from 27% market share to 2% market share BEFORE the layoffs.
Closed source software has already won. The only places GPL software is used is where cheap and good enough count.
The future is going to be more of the same. Linux on the desktop died for a reason. Well, a few reasons. Lack of good software and games. The need to switch distros often as rot sets in. Incompatibility.
Money counts, unless you're willing to live perma-squatting like RMS did, bumming free rooms off people several months at a time. Basically a homeless guy who didn't change the course of software development because proprietary software won. Money talks. It also buys things like housing and food. People prefer that to living like a permanent-bum.
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(Score: 2) by jmorris on Saturday October 31 2020, @06:34AM (1 child)
So lets take their whole list....
Free phone operating system
Purism and Pine will have this solved soon. Especially Pine, you can get a multi-boot image with over a dozen distros for their PinePhone. Most currently suck balls but progress is rapid. Several are now on the edge of daily driver. With luck I'll BE driving my PinePhone next week. Was waiting for power management to become a working thing, which it now is on multiple distributions. PostmarketOS got it this week. Just say no to systemd! It will be a long slog to build out a library of apps written from scratch or adapted to work in a phone environment, but the big hurdle is now past. The chicken and egg problem is cracked, nobody could develop on a phone because there weren't any phones that weren't obsolete / unavailable to buy new by the time a few maniacs had made it a viable platform to work with. Pinephone will remain on the market for several more years, Purism is hopefully going to soon have their higher end offering as a real product people can buy.
ATT will still have a track on me, but I'm about to go dark to Google. But I gotta be available so the kill switch on the modem isn't an option. If I could get everybody else to use XMPP I could idle on WiFi in a lot of cases but that is a long term dream.
Decentralization, federation, and self-hosting
This is the BIG, urgent need. Anything that anyone can do here will be appreciated in the dark age quickly closing down upon us. Resilient to censorship by the Tech Lords and Nation States is the hard challenge.
Free drivers, firmware, and hardware designs
In many areas this is already happening, in others we are doomed. Breaking loose a modern CPU from the DRM / remote spying is not something FSF can probably pull off though.
Real-time voice and video chat
This is being addressed on multiple fronts now. If it weren't for furious scaling to onboard the streams of refugees, Gab would have dropped their video conferencing product by now. All in browser (since they will never have access to an App Store) and open source.
Encourage contribution by people underrepresented in the community
Of course this where all their money will go. Lip service to the others.
Internationalization of free software
Being American I don't really care, but it IS important work that needs to happen if "World Domination" is going to be a reality.
Security by and for free software
Intelligent personal assistant
If FSF made a huge push here it would pay dividends. Just don't think they have the resources to make a sufficiently large push.
Help GNU/Linux distributions be committed to freedom
Political grandstanding. Blobs are ugly but we are going to be living with them as long as governments regulate radio with the current model. If we could get the blobs out of the CPU that would be nice. See above.
Free software adoption by governments
Political activism on this front is doomed. As long as certain megacorps can just grease politicians's palms to switch back, regardless the cost or pain, any mass conversions will be temporary at best. And we gotta keep undermining the network effects that reinforce the problem.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday October 31 2020, @02:20PM
The free phone system hasn't solved the chicken and egg problem - without apps, nobody wants it, and nobody is going to develop for it because there's no market. If you look at the previous list, nothing came of it. The FSF certainly isn't going to forgo their paycheques to fund all these projects.
Going dark to google has been easy for years. Get an iPhone.
People have been self hosting since the days of the BBS. The ISPs here don't care if you do. Also, renting server space is dirt cheap if you don't want to run a server from your living room.
Most laptops today have wifi, so there's no reason you can't join a mesh network and operate completely independently of the internet; others allow the mesh to access the Internet. Your choice. But it's hard to censor a mesh network.
Internationalization is already screwed. Thanks to W3 and shit like making emojis a standard. Too many standards, not enough people to support them. It's up to the people who want their language supported to do the work. After all, they're the best qualified, and if they can't be arsed to learn how, that's not really a pressing problem to them, so why should anyone else care?
Security? There already aren't enough people to do proper maintenance. Without fixing that there will be more cases of bugs hiding in plain sight for a decade or more until someone exploits them. Where's the budget for that coming from?
Personal assistant? No thanks. Don't want more spyware. That's why Siri is disabled. If I want something telling me what needs to be done, I'll stick with my dogs.
How to make Linux freer? Switch to bsd licencing. Oops, not possible and TOO free.
The FSF is part of the problem. They make a list of things they think are important, without coming up with ways to achieve the goals, and consider that as "job done." And it's true - they've gotten some free publicity and justified their jobs. But they haven't achieved shit. And from the other comments, I'm far from alone in saying they're useless.
There's been a shift in thinking over the last decade, and particularly in the last few months. People are no longer willing to accept that RMS, ESR, and the rest of the cabal of libertarian freetards are visionaries. After all, the average Linux distro has the same shitty programs it had at the turn of the century. The non-free operating systems and devices are still ahead, and increasing their lead, except for Chromebooks, which are spyware. Some legacy.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 31 2020, @09:01PM (2 children)
I think the top priority of the FSF should be building a GPLv3 kernel that can out-perform Linux. Relying on Linux as the kernel for GNU has done nothing for FSF and RMS except provide a constant source of getting kicked in the balls, over, and over, and over. The top priorities should be hardware, hardware, and more hardware, and some more hardware on top of that. All the free software in the WORLD won't matter once the only computers you can use are either tivo-ized or hardware backdoored so hard that you can't boot the machine without the backdoor open. Hardware and kernels; should be the ONLY priority. We have most of the software we need; there isn't a whole lot of novel things left to do except mix ingredients into different recipes... What we don't have is a lot of people who understand the important of freedom in software and computing. The short term always makes libre software seem unimportant; until the next new trendy invasion of privacy and limit to user freedom comes out. They incrementally downgrade society so slowly, it's hard for most people's busy lives to notice, or it happens slow enough to seem there is no consequence, thus capitalizing on indifference and ignorance. This is why we need hardware and a GPLv3 kernel. We need this because, in the span of the next 20 years it would probably be possible to truly make it impossible to have access to a computer in freedom. Android and iphone are beyond repair; they were designed to limit freedom. Desktop computers since 2012 now require PSP/Intel ME to even boot. We need Openpower and riscv. We need hardware. We need the GPLv3. We need drivers.
And I don't see why a, "libre phone," should be anywhere on this list. Yes, it would be nice; but, consider the resources required. I think, for me, a much better alternative to a, 'libre phone,' would be a handheld computer. If I had a handheld tablet computer with wifi; I'm good to go; all I'd need for it is GUI that can use touch and hopefully a way to plug it into a mouse/keyboard/monitor so I can do real work with it from time to time. Then, once I have that; I don't need a, 'compter phone,' I just need a phone capable of communicating with the cell-towers.
So, a two-device solution is not only much more practical and easier to maintain anonymity and security; it's also more feasable and easier to do. You can accomplish it now with a replicant/lineageos phone and a dumb phone to a decently usable degree. The cell networks aren't going to miraculously become, 'free/open,' so why bother? Give me something roughly the size of a Samsung Galaxy that I can dock to a station connected to a monitor/mouse/keyboard and will allow me to type, 'sudo apt upgrade,' in a virtual terminal; and then, allow me to undock it, put it in my pocket or a carrying bag so I can connect to wifi and swipe to my hearts content, read books, listen to music. Simple. Easy. Why reinvent the wheel. The hardware problem for this is damn near affordable to solve; and it sidesteps the whole android/iphone paradigm. That whole thing is a shitty paradigm; fuck it. Show me an android or iphone that can do what a desktop can do; they can't. We have the technology to solve this problem. Then, if I need to make a call, or send a text, I can just use a dumb phone.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday November 01 2020, @01:36AM (1 child)
But what can you expect for $50 or less? Slow, crappy resolution, low memory and storage. But you can do whatever you want with it, and if you break it no big loss because it was going to break soon enough anyway.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 01 2020, @08:43AM
Thanks for clearing that up; quite enlightening.