High Priority Free Software Projects

I wanted to talk about the new high priority project list that the FSF updated.
https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/

So here are my thoughts about:

-Free phone operating system
https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/free-phone

This cannot be achieve without the
"Free drivers, firmware, and hardware designs" project
And also some reverse engineering.

It's is indeed a important goal for the freedom of users since
"it hurts to say it" most web surfing is done by these devices.

The most promising project that I know for that is replicant
http://www.replicant.us/
The 8 august 2016 the replicant team announced that they where working on Replicant 6.0 please give them a hand if possible .
http://blog.replicant.us/2016/08/replicant-6-early-work-upstream-work-and-f-droid-issue/



-Decentralization, federation, and self-hosting
https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/decentralization-federation

This is also a good hight priority project.
And it has already began thanks to gnu social and other project like
diaspora and PostActiv.

But the terms used by the FSF are extremely wide and the projects that they have mentioned has examples are mainly social medias.

For example self-hosting, at home ? does my ISP allows that ? or are they using some tricks via their ""box"" or router to make your self hosting impossible or extremely difficult to use ?

I have myself experienced that with the ISP "free" in France who isn't neutral on what you do with your internet connexion and blocks or limits what you can do with their "box" or router.

So self-hosting and decentralization will also come thanks to free/libre hardware.
Think penguin has already a step ahead with their TPE-R1100 router.

Decentralization comes also with new and more anonymous protocols.
Tor is an example of that, but it's not the only one Gnunet is also a very promising sharing protocol that "I personally think" will surpass the torrent sharing system one day
thanks to it's design for complete anonymity and censorship-resistance.

Please look into these projects there is still so much to do to retrieve and maintain the freedoms that
we have now in computing.



-Free drivers, firmware, and hardware designs
https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/hardware-firmware-drivers

Don't forget free/libre manuals.
This is the most important and also most misunderstood of them all.
Why ?
Hardware and software are linked one cannot work without each other.
Hardware design is essential for multiple reasons just like in software.
-We can help correct it.
-We can learn from it.
-We can audit it.
etc...
It's part of the chain of tools that can make more tools.

Same thing goes for firmware and free drivers.

An example of abuse that is done in the hardware/software industry is the amazing hack that ""transforms"" nvidia Gforce graphique cards into their ""professional"" counterpart the Quadro series.
note: it's not really a transformation but more of a hack to make the software believe it's another cards.

http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/hacking-nvidia-cards-into-their-professional-counterparts/
I haven't yet read the complete thread that goes on since March 15, 2013.
The thread is very interesting I bumped into it a some time ago and learned a bit more thanks to it.

Thanks to this post I understood that software has a major part to do with how the software exploits the resources of the hardware and nowadays we don't realises how powerful the hardware is because of artificial limitation or just plain bad code.

Anyway there are tons of project to do, drivers for the hurd, linux and bsd.
-The lima project that needs help to be continued
note: beware if you step in that and stay anonymous allwinner is in a witch hunt against people who
are making a free/libre alternative to their non-free/libre drivers see the sad story of Luc Verhaegen.
http://libv.livejournal.com/
-The eoma68 project
http://rhombus-tech.net/freescale/iMX6/
-The libcore project
http://librecore.info/
-The radeon drivers (who needs to be deblobed)
https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/
-The nouveau project
https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/
-The Talos project who unfortunately didn't succeed into financing their project
https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing-systems/talos-secure-workstation

Please share and spread this, people need to know, and some of them might be interesting in giving a hand.



-Real-time voice and video chat
https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/voicevideochat

This software is more oriented for the general users but still an important goal since a lot of
people still use non-free software tools like discord or skype who are data mining what you say
and do.
For the datamining please watch this
https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8414-corporate_surveillance_digital_tracking_big_data_privacy

I recommend to the fsf to promote libre-signal instead if just signal since signal relays on non-free/libre dependencies like Google Cloud Messaging and non-free/libre server.
see more at:
https://sandervenema.ch/2016/11/why-i-wont-recommend-signal-anymore/



-Encourage contributions by people underrepresented in the community
https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/contribute

The goal of the project is noble but it is no software.
Free/Libre software is accessible to anyone because it is the nature of free/libre software to let the people have the freedoms to execute, study, modify and redistribute their tools.
This is important in the part of the community of free software but not software itself.

Further more has good the intentions are, we know, thanks to people like Eric Raymond who warned us about the problem, that it cannot end well.
see:
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6918

Free software gives us the freedom on tools that give us the capabilities to create, to build something without limitation.
But these people are using these tools not to promote freedom but to attract people in their ideology witch doesn't let people think in another way.
They encapsulate themselves from what they deem harmful, rejects or deny everything that aren't correct to their eyes and slanders everyone who aren't like them.
They are not what brings freedom and freespeech.



-Free software and accessibility
https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/accessibility

Making software for people with medical conditions is important but I am not shure if it should be a hight priority.
A secondary hight priority maybe, again I am not sure.
The problem with developing such software is that you also need to have someone in the said medical domain
to create something that concords to the needs and the needs are wide in that domain.

If you can contact or know someone in the ones of the vast medical area talk with them about free software maybe they'll be happy too help.
In some sense this could prepare the medical world against DRM hardware prosthetics and more so don't hesitate.



-Internationalization of free software
https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/internationalization

I don't know if it should be in the hight priority.
Make your software easily modular and translatable.
Nothing more to say here.



-Security by and for free software
https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/security-by-and-for-free-software

This is more of adversing for others freedom
Either way it's still important.

The self defence guide and encryption guide is good.
Talking about tor, https everywhere, lets encrypt etc... is also good.
But more tools like ublock origin, umatrix, icecat, gnunet should have bean mentioned.
Their is a lack of good tools and I wonder if it because what I mentioned earlier ;(



Intelligent personal assistant
https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/personalassistant

I do not have use of such tools but people say it is handy.
I cannot provide an objective comment about it so I won't say anything besides what the FSF says.


Help GNU/Linux distributions be committed to freedom
https://loadaverage.org/url/3411123

This is important seeking to see modifications in software to know if they are free or not or contains bad behaviours.
You can help with this by helping the FSF every Friday at 18:00Pm (paris time).

The work is pretty simple find a software, verify the license, verify all files (even scripts) have a header license, all
file must be readable (otherwise it's a binary), verify the license of the images (if video games)
if there is a missing license header send a mail or go on the git and open a ticket, same thing with binary blobs or
images/art.
Some projects are massive so it takes some time sometimes.
This is simply auditing for legal requirements.
You'll learn a lot about how some licenses works and some unfortunate software that are unfortunately non-free or abused their users in some way.


-Free software adoption by governments
https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/free-software-adoption-by-governments

For a democratic country, government needs to have control of their tools.
No control over your tools, no control of the government.
Why would public money would go into a closed system that gives your no right over it ?

It's advancing but the best example that I have is when Peru said no to Microsoft
See the translation here (this is the only place you'll have it so archive it)
https://opensource.org/docs/peru_and_ms.php

See the links provided by the FSF they are good too.

Whelp that's all folks.
Have a good night.
@maiyannah @bob @andmorethatIdontremembersorry