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Free Software Foundation Priority Projects

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Re: Free Software Foundation Priority Projects

#101

Post by hackuser »

shaftoe wrote: post #72
hackuser wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no force keeping people from contributing, they are just choosing not to. We all naturally have tunnel vision, and apply our experience to everyone else. I can't speak for you, but many people who don't face discrimination naturally don't encounter the obstacles and don't feel negatively toward minorities; they assume that therefore such things don't exist. But something is missing from our perception, beca…

I'm tired of the "check your privilege" crowd bringing their guilt mongering into everything. You know what I love about free software? It's ultimately judged on merits. I use software everyday written by all kinds of people, many of whom I would otherwise have little in common with. I don't care about their personal lives, political opinions, or baggage. I care about what they've produced and vice versa. It's the ul…

> You know what I love about free software? It's ultimately judged on merits.

If you like things judged on their merits, no doubt you are a strong, vocal opponent of any discrimination based on race, nationality, gender, sexuality, or anything else not related to merit.

Re: Free Software Foundation Priority Projects

#103

Post by hackuser »

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #57
hackuser wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no force keeping people from contributing, they are just choosing not to. We all naturally have tunnel vision, and apply our experience to everyone else. I can't speak for you, but many people who don't face discrimination naturally don't encounter the obstacles and don't feel negatively toward minorities; they assume that therefore such things don't exist. But something is missing from our perception, beca…

What affect does culture and income have on the prevalence of people in tech? Do white people who come from a poor background get into IT more than black people with poor backgrounds? What leads me to believe culture has more of an affect nowadays than race is the fact that Asians have higher average incomes than whites, even though they were also historically subjected to racism.

I'm sure culture and income have an effect, but it doesn't seem remotely plausible that there is no discrimination against black-skinned people in the United States. It's a fantasy that people struggle to rationalize, but you have to close your eyes to so much that is obvious.

Just because culture and income have some effect doesn't mean that skin color doesn't have a large effect. We can ask 'what if' forever, bringing up endless objections, but it's just a form of propaganda (intentionally or not) and doesn't change the obvious facts.

Re: Free Software Foundation Priority Projects

#104

Post by hackuser »

webmaven wrote: post #67
TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What affect does culture and income have on the prevalence of people in tech? Do white people who come from a poor background get into IT more than black people with poor backgrounds? What leads me to believe culture has more of an affect nowadays than race is the fact that Asians have higher average incomes than whites, even though they were also historically subjected to racism.

Are you asking about the effect of the culture of the underrepresented groups keeping them out of tech in general and free software in particular, or about the effect of the culture of overrepresented groups in keeping others out?

I'll take that as implying that the underrepresented groups are not victims of widespread discrimination. One really must struggle to believe - struggle to ignore what we all see in the world and struggle to disregard all the research.

The question I ask is: Why struggle? What is the motivation for denying these groups justice?

But to clarify one important point: Most discrimination is ignorance, IMHO, not intentional. People don't see their own cultural bias - e.g., instinctively trusting the person more like what they are already familiar with (which becomes self-fulfilling) - or overlook their advantages, such as the fact that the culture of their college and workplace are so natural to them that they don't even notice that there is a culture, but that it's alien and exclusive for others. They don't imagine what it's like to be the only woman or dark-skinned person in the room, all day every day, for the rest of their lives; never sure if it's going to cost you a promotion, a job, a client, etc.

Re: Free Software Foundation Priority Projects

#105

Post by yarrel »

no_wizard wrote: post #58
idobai wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Free/libre OSS won the battle for the server, lost the battle for the desktop I don't think it lost the battle on desktop - if you don't rely on platform(or interest)-specific software like the adobe/microsoft suites and some 3A games then you'll be more than fine on the linux desktop.

I take slight issue with this. It's not you personally, but I see this a lot in tech, in particular from the FOSS crowd 'Well, if you don't need x or y, then its fine!' FOSS will always be second tier for most people until the plethora of software available is at some relative parity, similar to that of macOS at least. (I'm talking strict availability). The fact that there isn't more cohesive efforts to have big soft…

> 'Well, if you don't need x or y, then its fine!'

This used to be the argument against the Mac in the 90s.

> We should be demanding better evangelism to get big name products on the platforms.

We should be demanding that they make their software free. If people want a free software base layer with proprietary software on top, there's macOS.

Re: Free Software Foundation Priority Projects

#106

Post by synchronise »

flukus wrote: post #77
finid wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FLOSS phone ecosystem will be hard to next to impossible, in my opinion Plasma Mobile is not in a bad state [1] [1]: https://plasma-mobile.org/

It is when you consider the state of hardware support. Hopefully something like the fairphone will become popular.

It doesn't help that the architecture that they build these phones on isn't largely standardised as it is on desktop PCs.

Until that is resolved, I don't see the hardware support issue being resolved.

Re: Free Software Foundation Priority Projects

#107

Post by flukus »

apsdsm wrote: post #99
flukus wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're slow, bloated and not native anywhere.

There's plenty of programs which are native to the environment they work in which are also slow and bloated.

But there are plenty that aren't, which can't be said for electron. I'll avoid the bloated ones regardless of the tech.

Re: Free Software Foundation Priority Projects

#108

Post by rwallace »

tmsldd wrote: post #92
carussell wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An AI-driven assistant doesn't have to necessarily run on someone else's servers and be under their control to be useful. In fact, if I teach my assistant patterns like how when I say "David" I mean David O, then I don't see a) why this type of learning can't be fully localized, or b) how phoning home with this kind of data is going to be of any particular use to anybody else, anyway. To put it another way, what's wr…

> what's wrong with letting my Siri and your Siri just be two different "people" instead of feeding back into a single, networked hivemind? Absolutely nothing wrong.. that would be great, actually. Question is how to do that without data and GPUs.

It's perfectly okay to say, if you want to get the most out of this program, you need a big GPU rig. The price of such should come down over time. That leaves the question of how to get the data. If you make it optional, will enough people opt in? Is it an acceptable compromise to make it opt-out?

Re: Free Software Foundation Priority Projects

#109

Post by posterboy »

idobai wrote: post #10
mynegation wrote: post #8

This is the right thing to do and I hope it is not too little too late. Free/libre OSS won the battle for the server, lost the battle for the desktop, but desktop is not (that) relevant anymore. FLOSS phone ecosystem will be hard to next to impossible, in my opinion, but worth going into. Self-hosted server side software has a very good chance of succeeding. For a long time I essentially wanted something like Synolog…

> Free/libre OSS won the battle for the server, lost the battle for the desktop I don't think it lost the battle on desktop - if you don't rely on platform(or interest)-specific software like the adobe/microsoft suites and some 3A games then you'll be more than fine on the linux desktop.

that's the point though, DRM-protection is largely incompatible with oss (it seems, but maybe not inherently so).

Re: Free Software Foundation Priority Projects

#110

Post by chriswarbo »

hub_ wrote: post #55
problems wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FLOSS phone ecosystem will be hard to next to impossible, in my opinion, but worth going into You can run Android without gapps fairly well, I believe there's even a project that replaces gapps and uses xposed to fake signatures so that they look legitimate to replace Google Maps and other in-app widgets frequently used on Android. Or you can run with GApps if you're willing to tolerate some level of proprietary so…

Does that include open source code for ALL the hardware?

> Does that include open source code for ALL the hardware?

I've stuck with my OpenMoko FreeRunner due to the lack of alternatives, and even that uses a proprietary driver for the GSM modem :(

Hopefully projects like GNUradio will lead to a solution for this.

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