High Priority Free Software Projects
fsf.org
fsf.org
Instead, why not spend time working on projects that will attract people to free software because it's only available as free software?
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.
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.
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.
That's really not the case.
> The most popular computers and electronics in the world are Apple products because Apple innovated.
That's part of it, but there were also huge quantities of marketing and money involved.
No technology wins on its own merits.
When you you look at their goals, they are by definition playing catch-up. You're also glossing over every single innovation that has come out of the open-source space.
The most popular computers and electronics in the world aren't Apple products because Apple made an Apple version of everything.
Actually, the fact their operating system is just an Apple version of unix is the primary reason I even considered purchasing my mac. The same rings true for most of the technical people I know who have macs.
I wonder on what basis you're saying this. When I look around me, I see very few Apple products. Maybe that depends on what part of the world you live in.
Well, there was the Linux-based CrunchPad before the iPad was even announced. Who knows what the world may be like if Fusion Garage hadn't severed ties with Arrington and released the overpriced Joojoo.
But what you're asking for is nonsensical. This list is the list of things that are preventing people from going "fully free". I'm not prevented from switching to free software because something that does not exist is not free software.
You're reducing a complex problem too far.
Sometimes that's through new paradigms, but more often that's through incremental evolution.
Have a great idea for a spreadsheet? To implement it competitively you'll spend 99% of your time reinventing Excel and 1% of your time on your great idea. Or you can add it to gnumeric.
More likely you'll release an Excel plug-in, but what do you do if Excel doesn't have the right API hooks?
Adding more is only one way to innovate. You can also innovate by changing things or by taking things away, thus bringing what remains into sharper focus.
A car does not do everything a horse can do and more, but cars still made horses obsolete for transportation. Cars can't jump over obstacles or reproduce, but apparently these features weren't really that important.
An iPad can't even compile Hello World in C, but apparently that isn't that important to a lot of people.
Nick Cernis innovated in the "to-do" space not by doing everything other to-do systems could do but by replacing software with a pencil-and-paper system that serves some people better (see: http://todoodlist.com/).
A spreadsheet is a means to an ends. If you have a great idea for a spreadsheet, what you really have is a great idea for something people need a better way to do that you think could be implemented in a spreadsheet. Instead of reinventing Excel, you might come up with an alternate way to get to the same end.
The point is that innovation comes in many forms.
The word you're looking for is "one".
If one wants to get converts, one should make the software that makes today's software obsolete. If one doesn't make it, someone else will, and when they do, one's FOSS version will be obsolete as well.
That being said, I don't know why Google Earth is in there. I understand applications like Flash and Skype but on a list of top items I can think of quite a few more things that are more useful than Google Earth.
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.
A free replacement for Flash is likely to become less useful in this situation, as other non-proprietary solutions are becoming prevalent.
A "unique to free software" solution makes it so people want and need to switch.
Between the two, I think creating incentives is more powerful than removing obstacles. (Given strong enough motivation, people will overcome obstacles. Lacking strong motivation, why bother?)
Let's innovate people...
The goal of the FSF is to promote the use of free software. If people won't or can't use free software because they need some proprietary program, then the goal of the FSF becomes to eliminate that need.
Sometimes this involves writing software that is better than proprietary equivalents (c.f. emacs and gcc in their early days). Sometimes it means just cloning what's there so you have something to use (most of coreutils falls into this category).
Because their goals include that everything possible should be possible for to do with free software. It is by definition a game of catch-up.
- 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.
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.
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.
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).
So my question is: Is there something actually wrong with the GIMP other than the fact that it is ugly? I don't consider the fact that it works differently from Photoshop a problem worth fixing.
/end ragefest. But come on, guys. It's not 'The Wikipedias'
2) It is deeply ingrained in the academic world.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MATLAB_Programming/Differences_...
I say this because I'm learning Octave mainly to get familiar with the Matlab-ish world (kinds of coding used in real world academia) and I wonder what I'm missing.
(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.)