6 ms·

It was my first time meeting Stallman at the Indie Tech Summit (where I also met the CloudFleet guys). He's a little eccentric, but he's one of the reasons I'm

It was my first time meeting Stallman at the Indie Tech Summit (where I also met the CloudFleet guys). He's a little eccentric, but he's one of the reasons I'm now on a Linux machine instead of a Mac!

juraj24 11y ago
You should then use Stalman-invented name gnu/linux. :-)
0xFFC 11y ago
GNU/Linux?
- whyever 11y ago
  If you do this, shouldn't it be GNU/BSD/Firefox/Linux?
  - xyzzy4 11y ago
    Don't forget the version numbers!
nextos 11y ago
I hope Stallman focusses on mobile now. Desktop, laptop & server are pretty satisfying free software platforms. But mobile is incredibly dissatisfying, and it's quickly getting a decent share of users. Incidentally, FSF is running a vision survey to establish strategic goals: https://my.fsf.org/civicrm/profile/create?gid=403&reset=1 https://my.fsf.org/civicrm/profile/create?gid=403&reset=1
- pmoriarty 11y ago
  Another frontier that the Free Software community should set their sights on is virtual reality. The potential impact of VR is enormous, and one of the leading VR development and content creation tools (Unreal Engine) recently open-sourced thier product (though I'm not sure if it was done with an FSF compatible license). Unity, the real giant in the VR arena, and Oculus' own code are closed, if I'm not mistaken. I'm not sure how open Oculus' competitors are (HTC Vive, Playstation Morpheus, and Microsoft's Hololens), but I wouldn't be surprised if they're all closed. Making a difference in the openness of the ecosystem at this relatively early stage in its development could make a big difference.
  - DonHopkins 11y ago
    High Fidelity [1] [2] [3] is an interesting open source [4] VR platform, developed by Second Life pioneer Philip Rosedale [5]. [1] https://www.highfidelity.io/ https://www.highfidelity.io/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Fidelity_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Fidelity_Inc [3] http://venturebeat.com/2015/10/28/virtual-world-pioneer-philip-rosedale-shows-off-virtual-toy-room-in-high-fidelity/ http://venturebeat.com/2015/10/28/virtual-world-pioneer-phil... [4] https://github.com/highfidelity https://github.com/highfidelity [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Rosedale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Rosedale
    - yarrel 11y ago
      I can build it on Debian 64 bit but it always crashes. Otherwise I'd be using it already.
  - shpx 11y ago
    Google is working on an Android based virtual reality OS [0], hopefully that will be free. Google Cardboard has a repo but it's just binaries. Valve/HTC are ostensibly working on opening their Vive headset through OpenVR, but the repo [1] is a bunch of binaries as well. Oculus freed the DK1 firmware [2] (not the sdk though), Linux support is coming after launch (probably not free though). Slight aside, Palmer said in an interview that they've noticed that people spend more time watching movies than gaming on the GearVR, so there's definitely tracking code in there. Finally there's OSVR, which seems the most promising, though the actual hardware maybe not so much[4]. Ultimately, I think there's enough to be optimistic about. Someone definitely should work on extending X11 or Wayland/Mir to VR, though I'm not sure how doable that is at the moment. Plus things are moving quickly right now, which complicates things even more. Probably will be good to wait for standardization, which Palmer has said will happen eventually, or build a mobile os for vr. [0] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/01/2016-google-tracker-everything-google-is-working-on-for-the-new-year/5/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/01/2016-google-tracker-e... [1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/openvr https://github.com/ValveSoftware/openvr [2] https://github.com/OculusVR/RiftDK1 https://github.com/OculusVR/RiftDK1 [3] https://github.com/OSVR/OSVR-Core https://github.com/OSVR/OSVR-Core [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbiIy4_6lMM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbiIy4_6lMM
- bobajeff 11y ago
  In addition to phones. It's obvious hardware should be tackled as most mobile hardware has firmware that is proprietary. Plus some hardware has features that is hard or impossible to turn off. Outside of phones there is router hardware.
- zanny 11y ago
  The battle for desktops and laptops is still not even close to won. Proprietary microcode in everything is on the rise, motherboard firmware is less open every generation of x86 hardware, and now we are seeing SSD microcontrollers be exploited and be otherwise untrustable. Gains have been made, in that GPUs are much more open now than they were 10 years ago from AMD and Intel, and AMD has done a good job supporting their chipsets in coreboot for the last several generations of hardware, but it is still practically impossible to buy off the shelf parts and build a computer you actually control unless you accept AMD's microcode blobs for GPUs. And its not something to ham fist and say "don't worry about it" because there have been multiple instances of bugs in the microcode the GPU boots with having bugs in it that break the graphics stack on Linux. Freedom is valuable everywhere even if you don't practically see yourself taking advantage of it.
  - nextos 11y ago
    I know. I'm not saying we should ignore desktops. But things are on the right path there, I think. I can order a brand new (and inexpensive) Rockchip Chromebook tomorrow and get it going on a fully open stack. Not even CPU microcodes, although I don't know about its SSD microcontroller. I think this is remarkable. Now, if we talk about mobile, there are only a few niche projects like Neo900 which might release extremely expensive, outdated and half free hardware. On the software side of things, Mer is pretty much dead, and Replicant offers very limited functionality only on cherrypicked old hardware.
    - yuhong 11y ago
      The reason it don't have CPU microcode though is that ARM is a RISC architecture I think.
    - iheartmemcache 11y ago
      Bunnie Huang (of MIT fame, original cracker of Xbox, proponent of open hardware [see: Chumby, Novena, etc]) has a really interesting talk given at the Media Labs in '15 at his alma mater[1]. It's about 1:15 but fully worth the watch including the QA, if you have any interest in 'open hardware'. That Rockchip run's on a fairly complicated 4core ARM. So which while the instruction set may be open, so is Intels. They'll happily ship to you their 3 volume multi-thousand page ISA. (Open is when you get to see any of final Altium/Cadence files that were used for the tape-out to make production wafers). At best you might get a few block diagrams. Good luck getting anything more than that. The closest you'll get to something open might be collaborative open standards a la the OpenPOWER (still, not that open) or RISC-V (which is probably still fab'ing at what, 65nm? 45?) Anyways, that Rockchip is far from open. watch the talk to see his rationale behind choosing Freescale as his microprocessor of choice. He remarks on how $2.25 SoC picked up on the streets of Shenzhen have the full capabilities to run on GSM, which is really pretty remarkable. Obviously they're stealing IP and probably using grey-market tech/seconds that failed QA, but when he talks about the innovation _within_ that grey-market its fascinating. Even with his PhD in EE from MIT, experience in taking consumer products to market multiple times, fluency in Mandarin to aide in his ability to navigate the markets of Shenzhen, he'd have a real difficult time making a low-unit production run to compete with half the functionality of a low-level Android at twice the price because of the massive barriers to market. (Starting with easy things like UL certs and proper EMI shielding to more difficult political issues in getting a phone like that through the FCC and to the consumer). There's no economies of scale to help when Johnny doesn't know why he needs OSS. Tangentially - if the N900 was still around I'd pay retail for it. [1]http://www.bunniestudios.com/ http://www.bunniestudios.com/ [2]The reason it's so cheap is because they're clearly not paying any licensing fees to the appropriate IP owners. Every time a phone gets pumped out in a market where companies have litigious recourse, you have compliance with FTDI and pay your taxes to use USB, rent your little carved out spectrum from the FCC, etc.
tmppppp 11y ago
GNU/Linux

juraj24 11y ago

You should then use Stalman-invented name gnu/linux. :-)

0xFFC 11y ago

GNU/Linux?

whyever 11y ago
If you do this, shouldn't it be GNU/BSD/Firefox/Linux?
- xyzzy4 11y ago
  Don't forget the version numbers!

nextos 11y ago

I hope Stallman focusses on mobile now. Desktop, laptop & server are pretty satisfying free software platforms. But mobile is incredibly dissatisfying, and it's quickly getting a decent share of users. Incidentally, FSF is running a vision survey to establish strategic goals: https://my.fsf.org/civicrm/profile/create?gid=403&reset=1 https://my.fsf.org/civicrm/profile/create?gid=403&reset=1

pmoriarty 11y ago
Another frontier that the Free Software community should set their sights on is virtual reality. The potential impact of VR is enormous, and one of the leading VR development and content creation tools (Unreal Engine) recently open-sourced thier product (though I'm not sure if it was done with an FSF compatible license). Unity, the real giant in the VR arena, and Oculus' own code are closed, if I'm not mistaken. I'm not sure how open Oculus' competitors are (HTC Vive, Playstation Morpheus, and Microsoft's Hololens), but I wouldn't be surprised if they're all closed. Making a difference in the openness of the ecosystem at this relatively early stage in its development could make a big difference.
- DonHopkins 11y ago
  High Fidelity [1] [2] [3] is an interesting open source [4] VR platform, developed by Second Life pioneer Philip Rosedale [5]. [1] https://www.highfidelity.io/ https://www.highfidelity.io/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Fidelity_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Fidelity_Inc [3] http://venturebeat.com/2015/10/28/virtual-world-pioneer-philip-rosedale-shows-off-virtual-toy-room-in-high-fidelity/ http://venturebeat.com/2015/10/28/virtual-world-pioneer-phil... [4] https://github.com/highfidelity https://github.com/highfidelity [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Rosedale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Rosedale
  - yarrel 11y ago
    I can build it on Debian 64 bit but it always crashes. Otherwise I'd be using it already.
- shpx 11y ago
  Google is working on an Android based virtual reality OS [0], hopefully that will be free. Google Cardboard has a repo but it's just binaries. Valve/HTC are ostensibly working on opening their Vive headset through OpenVR, but the repo [1] is a bunch of binaries as well. Oculus freed the DK1 firmware [2] (not the sdk though), Linux support is coming after launch (probably not free though). Slight aside, Palmer said in an interview that they've noticed that people spend more time watching movies than gaming on the GearVR, so there's definitely tracking code in there. Finally there's OSVR, which seems the most promising, though the actual hardware maybe not so much[4]. Ultimately, I think there's enough to be optimistic about. Someone definitely should work on extending X11 or Wayland/Mir to VR, though I'm not sure how doable that is at the moment. Plus things are moving quickly right now, which complicates things even more. Probably will be good to wait for standardization, which Palmer has said will happen eventually, or build a mobile os for vr. [0] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/01/2016-google-tracker-everything-google-is-working-on-for-the-new-year/5/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/01/2016-google-tracker-e... [1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/openvr https://github.com/ValveSoftware/openvr [2] https://github.com/OculusVR/RiftDK1 https://github.com/OculusVR/RiftDK1 [3] https://github.com/OSVR/OSVR-Core https://github.com/OSVR/OSVR-Core [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbiIy4_6lMM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbiIy4_6lMM
bobajeff 11y ago
In addition to phones. It's obvious hardware should be tackled as most mobile hardware has firmware that is proprietary. Plus some hardware has features that is hard or impossible to turn off. Outside of phones there is router hardware.
zanny 11y ago
The battle for desktops and laptops is still not even close to won. Proprietary microcode in everything is on the rise, motherboard firmware is less open every generation of x86 hardware, and now we are seeing SSD microcontrollers be exploited and be otherwise untrustable. Gains have been made, in that GPUs are much more open now than they were 10 years ago from AMD and Intel, and AMD has done a good job supporting their chipsets in coreboot for the last several generations of hardware, but it is still practically impossible to buy off the shelf parts and build a computer you actually control unless you accept AMD's microcode blobs for GPUs. And its not something to ham fist and say "don't worry about it" because there have been multiple instances of bugs in the microcode the GPU boots with having bugs in it that break the graphics stack on Linux. Freedom is valuable everywhere even if you don't practically see yourself taking advantage of it.
- nextos 11y ago
  I know. I'm not saying we should ignore desktops. But things are on the right path there, I think. I can order a brand new (and inexpensive) Rockchip Chromebook tomorrow and get it going on a fully open stack. Not even CPU microcodes, although I don't know about its SSD microcontroller. I think this is remarkable. Now, if we talk about mobile, there are only a few niche projects like Neo900 which might release extremely expensive, outdated and half free hardware. On the software side of things, Mer is pretty much dead, and Replicant offers very limited functionality only on cherrypicked old hardware.
  - yuhong 11y ago
    The reason it don't have CPU microcode though is that ARM is a RISC architecture I think.
  - iheartmemcache 11y ago
    Bunnie Huang (of MIT fame, original cracker of Xbox, proponent of open hardware [see: Chumby, Novena, etc]) has a really interesting talk given at the Media Labs in '15 at his alma mater[1]. It's about 1:15 but fully worth the watch including the QA, if you have any interest in 'open hardware'. That Rockchip run's on a fairly complicated 4core ARM. So which while the instruction set may be open, so is Intels. They'll happily ship to you their 3 volume multi-thousand page ISA. (Open is when you get to see any of final Altium/Cadence files that were used for the tape-out to make production wafers). At best you might get a few block diagrams. Good luck getting anything more than that. The closest you'll get to something open might be collaborative open standards a la the OpenPOWER (still, not that open) or RISC-V (which is probably still fab'ing at what, 65nm? 45?) Anyways, that Rockchip is far from open. watch the talk to see his rationale behind choosing Freescale as his microprocessor of choice. He remarks on how $2.25 SoC picked up on the streets of Shenzhen have the full capabilities to run on GSM, which is really pretty remarkable. Obviously they're stealing IP and probably using grey-market tech/seconds that failed QA, but when he talks about the innovation _within_ that grey-market its fascinating. Even with his PhD in EE from MIT, experience in taking consumer products to market multiple times, fluency in Mandarin to aide in his ability to navigate the markets of Shenzhen, he'd have a real difficult time making a low-unit production run to compete with half the functionality of a low-level Android at twice the price because of the massive barriers to market. (Starting with easy things like UL certs and proper EMI shielding to more difficult political issues in getting a phone like that through the FCC and to the consumer). There's no economies of scale to help when Johnny doesn't know why he needs OSS. Tangentially - if the N900 was still around I'd pay retail for it. [1]http://www.bunniestudios.com/ http://www.bunniestudios.com/ [2]The reason it's so cheap is because they're clearly not paying any licensing fees to the appropriate IP owners. Every time a phone gets pumped out in a market where companies have litigious recourse, you have compliance with FTDI and pay your taxes to use USB, rent your little carved out spectrum from the FCC, etc.

tmppppp 11y ago

GNU/Linux