

High Priority Free Software Projects - Flenser
http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects

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tghw
I'm kind of dismayed at the lack of innovation, or even appreciation for
innovation, in this list. It seems a waste to spend good developers time
cloning something like Google Earth, which is marginally useful to begin with,
already free (as in beer), just so that it can also be free (as in speech).

Instead, why not spend time working on projects that will attract people to
free software because it's only available as free software?

~~~
DanielStraight
Agreed.

The free software approach seems to assume that what a computer should be and
do has already been decided and they just need to make free versions of
everything. Like there's a certain set of programs that defines a complete
system and their goal is just to get from 60% or wherever they are now to
100%.

Apple, on the other hand, reinvents computing every 5 years or so (yes, that's
hyperbolic). If a FOSS advocate had created the iPad, the most popular device
in computing today would be FOSS. The most popular computers and electronics
in the world aren't Apple products because Apple made an Apple version of
everything. The most popular computers and electronics in the world are Apple
products because Apple innovated.

~~~
bryanlarsen
The most popular computers and electronics in the world are Apple products
because Apple polished everything to a sheen.

Sure apple created some cool stuff, but the open source world created some
pretty darn cool stuff too. Remember, the first web browser was open source.

~~~
TwistedWeasel
Great example, but that was a long time ago. The argument being made here is
that there isn't enough innovation in the free software space in recent years.

~~~
bryanlarsen
What about the massive strides that Chrome/Mozilla/WebKit are making? What
about the innovations in programming languages such as Clojure and Arc and
Erlang? What about the innovations in frameworks such as node.js and
sproutcore?

I could go on all day. IMO, it's a lot easier to find innovation in the open
source world than it is in the commercial world which seems to be more about
copy & polish than it does about innovation.

If you were arguing that open source lacked polish, I would agree with you.
But innovation? Hardly.

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garethsprice
"Some of the most important projects on our list are replacement projects.
These projects are important because they address areas where users are
continually being seduced into using nonfree software by the lack of an
adequate free replacement."

Why is having a free program that solves a problem that's already solved more
important than creating programs that solve new problems, but that also happen
to be free?

I find it hard to believe that the most important free software project in the
world is a player for passively consuming content in a proprietary format
(Flash), that is A) dying and B) more for eye candy than anything useful.

~~~
tjr
Because lack of such free software can hinder people who might be otherwise
interested in switching to a free operating system from actually doing so.

A free replacement for Flash is likely to become less useful in this
situation, as other non-proprietary solutions are becoming prevalent.

~~~
greenyoda
Why would a lack of a GPL Flash replacement hinder someone from switching to
Linux? Flash is already available for Linux (I've run it under Ubuntu), and
while it's not "free software", it's free of charge.

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joelthelion
What a weird list:

\- Flash is slowly dying, so is Gnash really that high a priority? Also, Gnash
seems to be far from being a good flash replacement; by the time it will be,
flash will be irrelevant. I'd argue work spent on Gnash is mostly wasted.

\- GNU Octave is far behind Python + Numpy/Scipy/Matplotlib. Better abandon it
and focus on the succesful platform.

~~~
Peaker
For people who only know how to use Matlab, Octave is one less reason to go
non-free.

~~~
joelthelion
I disagree. It's one reason for them to try a free software package, decide
that it sucks (it lacks most of the interesting libraries), and go back to
using Matlab forever.

If on the other hand they were introduced to the python stack, which has a
superior language and a lot of neat libraries (though not yet on par with
Matlab), they might have a chance of sticking to it.

~~~
Peaker
Porting Matlab code to Octave is much easier -- including more libraries.

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gurraman
Another project I would like to be high priority is GIMP.

Photoshop is the misruler and needs to be dethroned. It's a terrible piece of
software that, more or less, forces people to use non-free operative systems.
It has to be replaced and/or get some _real_ competition that would force
Adobe to get their act straight.

~~~
worldimperator
The piece of software that forces people like me to use non-free operative
systems is not Photoshop, but Gimp. And more horribly, Inkscape.

~~~
aw3c2
That sounds backward. How could some software that is merely available for
free drive you away from something? Also, have you tried alternatives? There
is not just GIMP...

~~~
eropple
There are no serious alternatives to GIMP, and GIMP in turn is not a serious
alternative to Photoshop. GIMP is an astonishingly user-hostile piece of
software--though to their credit it appears the developers have finally begun
to realize this and make changes with people who actually use graphics
software, not people who write graphics software, in mind.

However, even despite these new-ish developments, there is just no real open-
source answer to Photoshop (and Inkscape is only a partial one to
Illustrator).

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tmcw
It's OpenStreetMap. Not Open Street Maps. You can use as reference the domain
<http://www.openstreetmap.org/>, the logo with the word OpenStreetMap, or the
title element of the page, which says (wait for it) OpenStreetMap. Maybe cut
and paste that text, or line the browser windows up to reference.

/end ragefest. But come on, guys. It's not 'The Wikipedias'

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kanwisher
Octave should be higher, program is really far off from being any kind of
competitor to Matlab. Even the installation is daunting on OSX. Language has a
lot of idiosyncrocies to matlab. With ML/Computer vision becoming bigger,
could help a wave of new startups.

~~~
hogu
when I needed a free version of matlab, I switched to python and have never
looked back. better for me in every way. I think that python is a much better
direction for that type of computing anyways.

~~~
Jach
Those are my thoughts, but I also want to learn some more R as well. (I hear
stories of people going from Python, to R, back to Python, but I don't see why
one couldn't use both.) When you have two such powerful tools that can both be
extended and embedded fairly easily, why would one need Matlab anymore?

~~~
rcfox
1) There are tons of libraries for Matlab. Sure, you could rewrite them in
Python, but most people just want to get their work done.

2) It is deeply ingrained in the academic world.

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Sniffnoy
Regarding Skype, you're not going to get Skype users over to a free
alternative by making your own voice-chat program; you need to actually
reverse-engineer the protocol and make your own client so they can switch
without having to convince other people.

(Of course, someone did reverse engineer Skype however-long-ago-it-was-now,
but looking it up, apparently it might have been done by decompilation and so
of questionable legality, which is why nobody's making a Pidgin plugin to use
it. Annoying.)

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mvts
A free alternative to Oracle Forms? That's a pretty neat idea since in my
opinion OF actually serves the developers instead of enslaving them.

