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

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.