The FSF Is Looking To Update Its High Priority Free Software Projects List

[phoronix]

Phoronix: 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...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=FSF-High-Priority-Projects-2021

[tildearrow]

Free phone operating system - This could be argued that it's already accomplished from the likes of Ubuntu Touch to the various PinePhone efforts to PureOS on the Librem 5 to more... There is also Replicant and other free software project built off the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP).

Free? PureOS already exists, I would say...

Decentralization, federation, and self-hosting - A call for more decentralized services.

True, like it was in the past (e.g. IRC and XMPP).
The problem here is that the most popular proprietary services are very "human"... I mean... too simple to use and does not have a "computer" feeling anymore.

Free drivers, firmware, and hardware designs - Don't we all love free software drivers and that's been going rather dandy and more vendors in recent years contributing their open-soruce drivers to the Linux kernel. Open-source firmware and hardware designs though is another tough effort but at least the likes of Raptor Computing Systems with their libre POWER9 system has shown what's popular.

Aren't you being a bit too extremist?
It will at least be 20-30 years until completely free/open designs catch up to current ones, and even so, after those 30 years the new devices will be light years ahead of your free/open ones...

Real-time voice and video chat - There exists various free software solutions these days albeit popular ones with the masses is another story...

Agreed. Until we make it "just work" and be "easy to use", this won't happen and I am kind of disappointed.

Encourage contribution by people underrepres-

OK, sorry for being harsh, but I need to put this clearly.

Can we go back to work?

(too long; didn't read: Why does this even matter?)

Internationalization of free software - This seems to continue to be happening as well as ever.

Yep. I don't think there is any problem here...

Security by and for free software - Is security ever complete?

No, but I know you love to over-engineer it (see GNU Hurd, info instead of man and others).

Intelligent personal assistant - Mycroft is the best open-source alternative to the likes of Google Home and Amazon's Alexa.

Mycroft actually is incomplete and absolutely behind when compated to the ones you mentioned.
This is partially because it uses CMU Sphinx- wait this is no longer the case... let me say it again.

This is partially because it uses DeepSpeech.
While it is a fairly good speech recognition engine, I kind of feel that Kaldi is much more accurate and lighter at this task (while still being open-source!)...

Help GNU/Linux distributions be committed to freedom - The Free Software Foundation continues to endorse the likes of Guix, Hyperbola, PureOS, Trisquel, and other distributions most have never heard of but ship without any firmware binaries or other blobs.

Distributions only 10 people use.

Free software adoption by governments - A rather sticky and never-ending matter...

......... dream

[zeehio]

Mycroft actually is incomplete and absolutely behind when compated to the ones you mentioned.
This is partially because it uses CMU Sphinx- wait this is no longer the case... let me say it again.

This is partially because it uses DeepSpeech.
While it is a fairly good speech recognition engine, I kind of feel that Kaldi is much more accurate and lighter at this task (while still being open-source!)...

Mycroft uses Google STT. https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/m...ch-to-text-stt

[tildearrow]

Mycroft uses Google STT. https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/m...ch-to-text-stt

Mycroft violates the user's privacy completely then, and is lying on the main page.

Google is a planet-sized monster that eats and sells our data.

[rene]

Oh, more "high priority" stuff like the PowerVR reverse engineering they have zero plan to do or support, and just hope other people to do for them, ... ;-)

[Alexmitter]

Free? PureOS already exists, I would say...



True, like it was in the past (e.g. IRC and XMPP).
The problem here is that the most popular proprietary services are very "human"... I mean... too simple to use and does not have a "computer" feeling anymore.



Aren't you being a bit too extremist?
It will at least be 20-30 years until completely free/open designs catch up to current ones, and even so, after those 30 years the new devices will be light years ahead of your free/open ones...



Agreed. Until we make it "just work" and be "easy to use", this won't happen and I am kind of disappointed.



OK, sorry for being harsh, but I need to put this clearly.

Can we go back to work?

(too long; didn't read: Why does this even matter?)



Yep. I don't think there is any problem here...



No, but I know you love to over-engineer it (see GNU Hurd, info instead of man and others).



Mycroft actually is incomplete and absolutely behind when compated to the ones you mentioned.
This is partially because it uses CMU Sphinx- wait this is no longer the case... let me say it again.

This is partially because it uses DeepSpeech.
While it is a fairly good speech recognition engine, I kind of feel that Kaldi is much more accurate and lighter at this task (while still being open-source!)...



Distributions only 10 people use.



......... dream

Why did I even expect anything but the usual from you.

[Alexmitter]

Mycroft violates the user's privacy completely then, and is lying on the main page.

Google is a planet-sized monster that eats and sells our data.

Ah yes, the locally run FLOSS software that magically transfers your nudes to Google.

[libv]

Wake me up when the FSF decides to become actually relevant and use its supposed political weight to help get real things done instead of just wasting everyone's time.

[skeevy420]

Free? PureOS already exists, I would say...

The OS and software existing is irrelevant if it can't be installed on very many phones. That's where @libv's comment comes into play.

True, like it was in the past (e.g. IRC and XMPP).
The problem here is that the most popular proprietary services are very "human"... I mean... too simple to use and does not have a "computer" feeling anymore.

I don't really like how most things are dumbed down either.

Aren't you being a bit too extremist?
It will at least be 20-30 years until completely free/open designs catch up to current ones, and even so, after those 30 years the new devices will be light years ahead of your free/open ones...

That just depends on who you are and what you're happy with. If you're the kind of person happy with Core2Quad, you'll be happy with open designs. That covers the majority of office, library, retail, and dumb terminals.

Agreed. Until we make it "just work" and be "easy to use", this won't happen and I am kind of disappointed.

Due to the infrastructure involved, that's easier said than done.

OK, sorry for being harsh, but I need to put this clearly.

Can we go back to work?

(too long; didn't read: Why does this even matter?)

Imagine if all Phoronix was just me, you, and starship having a circlejerk over Plasma and KWin. More and diverse people lead to more and diverse conversations and the FSF and other places think more and diverse developers will lead to more and diverse software.

Yep. I don't think there is any problem here...

Agreed. Seems like most projects consider internationalization and more than US English these days. Got to LOL when my Dad had to scroll down to the U's to pick United States in a game the other day. Why weren't we at the top? The alphabet doesn't start with U . Response:

No, but I know you love to over-engineer it (see GNU Hurd, info instead of man and others).

Over-engineering is why they get into security. Almost every-other job will tell them STFU, it's good enough.

[QUOTE]Mycroft actually is incomplete and absolutely behind when compated to the ones you mentioned.
This is partially because it uses CMU Sphinx- wait this is no longer the case... let me say it again.

This is partially because it uses DeepSpeech.
While it is a fairly good speech recognition engine, I kind of feel that Kaldi is much more accurate and lighter at this task (while still being open-source!)...[QUOTE]

Never messed with any of that. No comments.

Distributions only 10 people use.

It'd be nice if they'd ease-up on their firmware/microcode restrictions so they'd actually be useful operations systems with the bulk of existing hardware.

......... dream

Hard to out-lobby (bribe) Microsoft and Apple.

[_ONH_]

encourage contributions of underrepresented people

„create interest in underrepresented groups to contribute and enable them to contribute“

Would be what they want to achieve with that. The second part does partial include encouraging and is imho what outreachy and gsoc, Evoc primarily contribute to.

But the first step to be done ist to create interest, encouraging doesn’t work alone.
Without interest no one here would have started to contribute to something, being it a organisation or part of a project of any kind.

Moste organisations and society rely on existing stakeholder to pull others into spontaneously.
This works as far as you have a significant peergroup within a community.
One lacks this in almost 100% of the cases where one wants to pull underrepresented groups into the game.
Longterm lack of creating interest leads to dissolve of organisations.

Therefor I think it is stupide in they way x.org approach this goal.

Let alone the apparent zeroing diverse thinking white male out of the loop, while for being not in the vincity of of average male white world, but also not close enough in the diverse gender groups. The gender thing itselve is hilarious, and should not exist at al beside -+1 year of giving birth to a child.

To achieve a much diverse (thinking) oss community longterm.
There is a need for a different approach, which is more broad to create interest independent of gender and ethnic groups.
If one is able to create interest the contribution comes with almost 0 effort, if the enablement is there and thee is an impression to be able to change something, diversity will gonna be a byproduct.
In many cases social expectations are the biggest hurdles. And gender is the bs we have to go along today.