Free Software Foundation Shakes Up Its List of Priority Projects (networkworld.com)

alphadogg quotes Network World: The Free Software Foundation Tuesday announced a major rethinking of the software projects that it supports, putting top priority on a free mobile operating system, accessibility, and driver development, among other areas. The foundation has maintained the High Priority Projects list since 2005, when it contained just four free software projects. [That rose to 12 projects by 2008, though the changelog shows at least seven projects have since been removed.] Today's version mostly identifies priority areas, along with a few specific projects in key areas.
The new list shows the FSF will continue financially supporting Replicant, their free version of Android, and they're also still supporting projects to create a free software replacement for Skype with real-time voice and video capabilities. But they're now also prioritizing various projects to replace Siri, Google Now, Alexa, and Cortana with a free-software personal assistant, which they view as "crucial to preserving users' control over their technology and data while still giving them the benefits such software has for many."

And other priorities now include internationalization, accessibility, decentralization and self-hosting, and encouraging governments to adopt free software.

Comments

smh

[Nutria]

"We can't build a kernel in a reasonable amount of time, so instead we'll take on projects that meld AI, natural language and voice recognition!!"

New projects are even more misguided than the old?

[Dahamma]

I looked at the projects from 2008, and AFAIK none of them have really made much progress or are already dead. Gnash, really? Luckily for everyone (except Adobe) Flash is in it's death knell in 2017. Coreboot is a great concept (I have used LinuxBIOS in a couple of projects) but ultimately doomed because firmware/BIOS is intimately tied to hardware - it will be great for hobby projects but by definition never be useful for mainstream PCs. And so it goes down the list...

And the 2017 list... Free smartphone OS basically seems to be "free Android" - I'm sure it will be about as successful at the 2008 goal with "gNewSense". FSF personal assistant? Could it be possible they don't understand how these work? It's trivial client software with billions of dollars in server hardware behind it. And seriously, "projects that replace Google, Facebook Apple, and so on"? Again, you don't replace those unless you have billions in backend investment and billions of users.

I commend them on finally trying to address the totally dysfunctional open source community in terms of female and minority inclusion, but they still need to prioritize actual useful *projects*, not just processes...

Can anyone point me to the previous list?

[93 Escort Wagon]

I read TFA because I was curious to see what the FSF felt they'd accomplished in the last twelve years; but, alas, there's no mention of the list's former contents.

I have trouble believing a group which has been unable to get a working Hurd released sometime during the past three decades is capable of accomplishing any of their stated "high priority" goals.

I don't mean to discount their philosophical importance; but really I think that's pretty much the sum total of their impact.

Because it's not really GNU/Linux

[dbIII]

Linux is not a GNU project. That's why not.

Free software assistant... already exists

[fyngyrz]

Free software assistant... already exists

http://mycroft.ai

They've got an RPi image you can download, slap on a card, and be up and running with a USB mic and something to handle the audio out.

Seems to me like the FSF should pay more attention to what is already going on.

Re:New projects are even more misguided than the o

[WaffleMonster]

And the 2017 list... Free smartphone OS basically seems to be "free Android" - I'm sure it will be about as successful at the 2008 goal with "gNewSense". FSF personal assistant? Could it be possible they don't understand how these work? It's trivial client software with billions of dollars in server hardware behind it. And seriously, "projects that replace Google, Facebook Apple, and so on"? Again, you don't replace those unless you have billions in backend investment and billions of users.

Originally "intelligent agents" were supposed to be software running on the users behalf which strived to understand contextually what the users needs were and act to support the user. What actually happened big data cyber stalking firms have entirely corrupted this vision.

It isn't that you start over and run parallel infrastructure. It is more about designing local agents able to effectively leverage the network as it is to fulfill needs of the user. There is no reason an IA can't run a google, wolfram alpha, bing search, check specialized databases of interest or rummage through your email or local files on your behalf. The only difference is the IA is acting in YOUR best interests NOT a third parties and it isn't sending all of your local personal shit to god knows who for god knows why.

Current systems are more than capable of doing NLP and voice recognition locally. Even if you go with generic ANN approach for recognition you don't need exotic hardware to use a trained network. Granted all of this requires specialized skills but far from unreasonable.

If done properly you can provide value with IA's the likes of siri, cortana, alexa...etc can't because it's not in their business model. If you got the basic interfaces, perhaps some specialized DSLs and focus on making it easy for people to build their own agent logic and share it with others.. there is a chance... perhaps a small one of creating something that snowballs where the value and the capabilities of the IA grows organically as more people contribute or improve upon logic that scratches their itches.

Re:New projects are even more misguided than the o

[AmiMoJo]

Chromebooks use Coreboot, and they regularly top the lists of most popular laptops on Amazon. The firmware/binary blog thing isn't as much of an issue as you might think, since the basic idea of Coreboot is to do the minimum possible to boot the OS rather than replace all the random BIOS functions and crud built up over the years.

Replicant is likely a response to Cyanogen giving up, and an attempt to find some way around the binary blob hell that is smartphone chipsets. Well, these days Android runs on a lot more than just phones, and things like tablets tend to have more transparent hardware for their radios so it's far from an impossible goal.

Personal assistants could easily use your own personal server. The speech recognition might not be quite as good, but of course you can just type stuff. In any case, being able to look up results on your choice of search engine or Wikipedia, and being able to interpret simple commands like "set a reminder for next Tuesday at 7 PM" hardly requires billions of dollars of hardware. There are some useful Google Now features I don't use for privacy reasons, like traffic info cards, which could easily be replaced by free software even if I have to explicitly tell it my route home from work rather than it using machine learning to figure it out for me.

we really do need free mobile platform

[cats-paw]

given the opportunities for snooping, they level of insecurity that is here and only going to get worse, a free mobile OS would be a great thing.

google's efforts at completely eliminating your privacy (i HAVE to sync my calendar to the google, WTF?!) is evil.

couple of problems:

how does this work with the carriers. are they free to keep your phone off the air once they start doing OS checks ?

pushing an OS onto a variety of hardware, just as on PCs is definitely painful, and I think it's going to be much worse for mobile phones. Lots of parts are proprietary and require NDAs to have access to datasheets. Not sure how you get around this problem.