Free Software Foundation Priority Projects

> 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, because the evidence is overwhelming. Just consider that a black-skinned person in the U.S., for example, would be insane to assume they face no racism and no risks from it. A woman in IT would be willfully ignorant to think there is no sexism and she faces no threat from it.

* The historical record is overwhelming, and does not need to be recounted.

* Consider that white-skinned males make up ~33% of the U.S. population, yet look at their overwhelming prevalence in tech, business leadership, government, entertainment, and elsewhere - far more than a 1/3 of the people you see are white guys. Probably not coincidentally, it's the group that benefited most from prior centuries of discrimination. If it was a meritocracy, what is the statistical chance that Silicon Valley or the U.S. Senate would turn out to be so overwhelmingly white male? I doubt you believe that their skin color and gender make them superior (and if someone does, then we don't have to argue about where the barriers are); so how else do we explain their overwhelming proportion of success, and the lack of success for so many minorities?

* Surveys show that large numbers have prejudicial views of people of other races, religions, nationalities, etc. Look at the widespread support in Western countries for openly discriminatory leaders, openly discriminatory policies, and similar behavior by many citizens. This includes discrimination by religion (e.g., Muslims), race (e.g., blacks), nationality (immigrants), etc. Many people, even some on HN, claim it's ok to discriminate (to be clear, I don't mean the parent comment), but in the next breath argue that discrimination doesn't exist.

There's a lot of literature that answers your question, explaining what those barriers are and what they look like from other people's perspectives.

I think the FSF is spot on with most of these priorities. The free phone and decentralized web, in particular, are areas for massive improvement and will be necessary for a FOSSful world. Getting governments to adopt free software is also a great priority, as they write the laws that govern the software ecosystem and could be a huge source of revenue for free software projects.

Why would that be on the list? Isn't there already a solution? It doesn't need to be GPL licensed for getting FSF recognition - a non copyleft but Libre license is fine.

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 software vendors port their software to FOSS systems I feel like is part of the problem.

I personally feel the FOSS community doesn't have good evangelism to actual software developers that develop non-idealistic software. Adobe is a good example of this. So is Microsoft. So is Autodesk (With some exceptions, granted, but I think those come from the need to run in parallel processing environments that Linux supports quite well, and Maya). Heck, so is Wunderlist. Or 2do. 1password. They don't make native apps or even some semblance of apps for any FOSS platform, and I see no attempts to evangelize coming out of FOSS communities to get these places on their side. I'm sure there are exceptions I'm missing or perhaps some of these examples listed have progressed but my point still stands.

FOSS is great for users, and has really evangelized well to a certain subset of users in particular (mostly the tech literate enthusiasts and developer crowd, myself included). I however, will never accept this is a good answer. We should be demanding better evangelism to get big name products on the platforms. I do the best I can myself in this regard, but I feel that the entire idea that we should be more inclusive of these vendors/companies/developers is scoffed at in the FOSS/OSS communities and I do not inherently understand why. Yes, they create code that isn't meeting the guidelines of FOSS/OSS, but if you don't create the best toolsets independent of them or have some semblance of balance, then the platform will stagnant at x number of users.

I think idealism colors perspectives but reality is much more grey than either side is willing to cede, perhaps.

Unrelated, but they should really reform their site. If a phone OS is a goal, a mobile friendly site should be a first.