The Sad State Of FSF's High Priority Projects

[AnonymousCoward]

Exactly. I don't know what drives some people to look at crap like hurd or haiku when there's Linux. I'm sure when the hurd matures (just kidding) they'll start looking at something else in the name of something. Hurd is not only unready, but it will be SLOW.

Because Linux is boring, old skool and sounds like some local Finnish dish made out reindeer intestines or some other mystery meat, i.e., something you'd really not want to eat.

[babali]

But hey, ever since LLVM (and later Clang) was released there have been those claiming that it would kill GCC 'any day now', years pass and both projects are still going strong with no sign of slowing down. I can only attribute the desire of some people to have GCC disappear to be some anti-GPL effort since as for those of use USING these compilers this competition is warmly welcomed and certainly having a positive effect on the quality of BOTH these compiler toolchains.

Not sure that people may want to kill gcc, but replace it probably. The problem with GCC is until recently everything was in C, the code was almost not understandable and I think it's more related to old coding practices rather than true complex situations. And, gcc was not extensible by plugins for political reasons. So in the end you have a free software (GPL), of course you are free to read the code and modify it, but in fact you can't understand the code and can't replace it because it's too complicated... and limited (no plugins) because of political reasons (GPL).

It is a kind of funny way to loose your "ability" for your "freedom", isn't it ? :-)

[XorEaxEax]

Its like using WINE or Windows, both are worse than using native.

Not sure I understand this statement, 'both worse than using native.'? Windows would be native here... Obviously Wine will never be a drop-in replacement for native Windows installation (or VM) but it certainly runs alot of things. A couple of months ago I wanted to add some effects to a 3d-animation I had rendered and was pleasantly surprised to see that Wine ran all the windows avisynth plugins I threw at it which together with avs2yuv made for a very nice pipeline with previewing through AvsPmod (also under Wine).

No one uses Gnash, you either use Flash or don?t use Flash.

I agree here, I don't see any point in putting resources (small as they may be) into an reverse engineering flash.

GCC maybe one of the best GNU projects up to the time, but Apple supported BSD-licensed and more advanced LLVM is quickly catching up.

'Quickly catching up'? Apple started to sponsor (as in hiring developers to work on it full-time) back in 2005 and it's not yet a replacement for GCC (Apple still ships with gcc 4.2 as default compiler last time I checked). Clang has been in development (again with Apple sponsoring) since 2007 and it's yet not close to being a drop-in replacement for the GCC frontend. Meanwhile GCC is also developing, and has added plugin-support which was one of the benefits LLVM cited over GCC. LLVM itself does offer a great benefit over GCC though with it's prominent use as a jit-compiler framework and has been seeing alot of uptake in this area. However, as a C/C++ static compiler solution Clang/LLVM has ways to go before it's a realistic replacement for GCC, both in terms of compability and performance (of generated code).

But hey, ever since LLVM (and later Clang) was released there have been those claiming that it would kill GCC 'any day now', years pass and both projects are still going strong with no sign of slowing down. I can only attribute the desire of some people to have GCC disappear to be some anti-GPL effort since as for those of use USING these compilers this competition is warmly welcomed and certainly having a positive effect on the quality of BOTH these compiler toolchains.

[babali]

FSF should just throw themselves into finishing off GnuStep. It just needs a web browser, and the multimedia framework/hardware configuration panels then it'll kick the crap out of all the other desktop platforms. It's basically OSX on Linux without the stupid limitations. (mac menu can be turned on or off, menus can be per window or mac style, more than one instance of an app can be run at once, or not depending on how you want it). It's seriously better than any other choices out there for desktop usability.

Why would be GNUStep better than other desktops like KDE, GNOME, Xfce, ... ?
What do you think of ?toil? ?

[deanjo]

Because no landlord or car seller accepts bier as payment,

Lol, actually I have sold an old beater car for 3 cases of beer and I also allow my bro-in-law to rent space for winter storage of his car for the amount of 1 case per month. :P

[crazycheese]

This whole post is clinically insane. Management strategy? WTF? Scrap GCC and the GNU toolchain?

No, not GCC, but everything on the Michael list.
No one uses Gnash, you either use Flash or don?t use Flash. Its like using WINE or Windows, both are worse than using native.
Currently FSF tries to perform something that people in the shop do for commercial proprietary software and do it better than FSF.
The whole meaning of my post was to attract the "people from the street" into financing free software instead of supporting proprietary. Reread it.

You are pushing FSF into never ending battle against proprietary, where FSF immediately assigns itself into losing position; my wish is for FSF to take provider role between non-hackers (buyers) and developers.
Because for you freedom of software is higher than its functionality, and for normal people I know functionality is much more important than eventual freedom. They are ok to pay and get something that they want, and so long it works they will continue to invest into non-free software. FSF is fighting windmills and loosing energy catching mice instead to understand why mice is always faster and become quicker than mice itself.

GCC maybe one of the best GNU projects up to the time, but Apple supported BSD-licensed and more advanced LLVM is quickly catching up.
Unless GNU understands exactly why this was possible and adapts the mechanism to profit of free software engineering, it is matter of time when GCC looses as well.

The Free Software ecosystem was never about a powerful leader organising a strategy against Microsoft, to win a "desktop war". It has always been about a community who believes in software freedom. If we don't have a community who values Free Software, we will perish. It's as simple as that. It's not a management battle between RMS and Gates.

You don?t need FSF for this. You need just Oktoberfest ticket for this.
Same, if we?d to celelebrate values of proprietary BS.
It won?t improve the product quality though, won?t attract more people into using it and valueing its advantages, won?t make them pay what they can or help improve it.
Because no landlord or car seller accepts bier as payment, professional developers are automatically excluded from FLOSS ecosystem. And there are people who will gladly pay them, provided stuff just works or stuff becomes improvements they are happy to pay for.

[Pickup]

Now that Microsoft owns Skype, the Free Software Foundation is likely to hate Skype even more.

And this is no good. Now that Microsoft owns Skype and integrates it into the next versions of Windows, other VOIP projects are doomed to become meaningless.
You may tell me "it is the same thing people said about every browser other than explorer 10 years ago, but then Firefox came and things changed". No, it isn't the same. Not at all. The browser war was possible (itself) because HTML is an open standard, and any browser you mind to write would be capable to play it. But Skype protocol is tight closed, overpatented and overcopyrighted, and not compatible with other protocols. If you can't write a Skype client on your own, there's no chance you can IP-phone to the majority of Ip voice users.

[DMJC]

GNUStep

FSF should just throw themselves into finishing off GnuStep. It just needs a web browser, and the multimedia framework/hardware configuration panels then it'll kick the crap out of all the other desktop platforms. It's basically OSX on Linux without the stupid limitations. (mac menu can be turned on or off, menus can be per window or mac style, more than one instance of an app can be run at once, or not depending on how you want it). It's seriously better than any other choices out there for desktop usability.

[TheBlackCat]

The Hurd promises many interesting capabilities which are just not possible with a monolithic kernel design, and these possibilities are evident to any user of the system. Imagine navigating various types of remote file systems, databases, code repositories, etc. all as if they were just files on your local system? Using tar, cp, vi/emacs, on these files in the same way as you do with local files is possible due to the user-space Hurd translators which serve as wrappers which make this possible.

You mean like fuse allows on Linux? That is the thing I don't understand about all this "microkernel" stuff. Linux already has support for userspace drivers of several types. If someone really wants userspace drivers, why can't they just code better support for that in the Linux kernel like people have already done for some systems? So rather than just dumping a well-supported and heavily-tested kernel for an entire new one, you slowly migrate (where appropriate) to a more userspace-level design. This seems to be a much more efficient approach.

Another interesting possibility is that various parts of the Hurd can be written in other programming languages, which has both benefits and drawbacks. But this possibility makes it that much easier for the various code bases to be used for features of the operating system which weren't possible with other systems.

You mean like the various fuse bindings?

[kraftman]

Revolution is cool and stuff but first and foremost you have to have something that WORKS and be able to deliver. Linux works, Haiku is in Alpha. HURD is NOT ready.

until its ready they can hopefully dedicate some resources in helping mesa which is something we need NOW.

Exactly. I don't know what drives some people to look at crap like hurd or haiku when there's Linux. I'm sure when the hurd matures (just kidding) they'll start looking at something else in the name of something. Hurd is not only unready, but it will be SLOW.