Hi Paul Thanks for your mail, which raised some points that are very close to what I myself have been thinking for some time now, albeit I believe with a rather different backstory.
On 5/6/19 5:39 PM, Paul Boddie wrote: [..] > I think I often make the point that advocacy has its place in encouraging > Free > Software adoption, but there also has to be viable Free Software to be > adopted. Waiting for people to make Free Software solutions so that they may > be promoted is a rather market-focused or consumerist way of working. That > may > work out fairly well for some things, but it rather fails for many others. > > Free Software mobile solutions are a challenging area, not least because > there > needs to be software development at several levels. A practical user > interface > must be provided, which has been a particular challenge over the years, > compounded further by rather impractical and bizarre decisions taken by the > more established Free Software desktop projects whose code ends up being used. > > Low-level software must be designed and implemented, with all the challenges > of writing drivers for the perpetually moving target that is Linux (most > commonly) combined with the usual matter of reconciling vendor documentation > (if available) with reality. The "middleware" that plumbs everything together > must be designed and implemented having had only rare outings in actual > products, meaning that its maturity might not be so great. This! Incidentally, today I attended a talk with RMS in Aalborg, here in Denmark. In the question time, I asked him if it wasn't a contradiction that he's talking a lot about free software as a thing for communities of people - also non-virtual - but that if you look at software for self-organizing communities, there's not a lot of it, and it's not without its problems; what there's *really* a lot of in the ecosystem is programming tools, with a disproportionate share funded by companies like Google and Facebook who may produce a lot of free software but aren't really friends of software freedom. RMS answered that that's because that's what people are interested in; the FSF might want to make more software for ordinary people, but it doesn't really have the funding for such a thing, whereas the people who are active - i.e., to a wide extent those who *do* have funding - are making a lot of the infrastructure components and programming tools that I actually love to work with, but don't at the end of the day do a lot for the empowerment of more ordinary (less technical) communities. So it's the same point as you make: One reason for the lack of adoption of free software may be a lack of awareness, but it's also to a wide extent a lack of *actual software* to fill people's needs. And this is indeed especially true of mobile devices, where people are depending on proprietary apps that often work well, but at the cost of freedom and privacy. In the years I've been in contact with the FSFE, the organization has mainly been focusing on campaigns as well as on legal matters - patents and other, indeed very important, stuff. But maybe the FSFE should, if it were possible, consider producing and funding free software itself, the way the FSF has been funding and spearheading the GNU project. An idea could be trying to create the necessary infrastructure for truly free mobile phones, to follow Paul's thoughts here. This depends, of course, on the available budget, and development efforts are not cheap; however, I think an organization like the FSFE could make a real difference here. As with the GNU project, the desire to run valuable free software projects with (say) two to three paid developers and a community organizer to coordinate volunteers might attract more contributions by itself. By this proposal, of course, I may be re-raising a point that has been discussed many times before and been decided against for good reasons, but Paul is right: In crucial areas, software freedom needs actual software more than advocacy; and "the market" won't solve this, because the large players in the mobile area simply have no interest in Freedom - and so, using some of the organization's funding to actually create this software could go a long way. As someone who makes their living writing software, I'm all too conscious of financial limitations and used to be responsible about budgets, but within (once again, say) the mobile area it might be possible to start out with achievable goals in terms of usability and impact and take it "stepwise". Best Carsten _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list Discussion@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion This mailing list is covered by the FSFE's Code of Conduct. All participants are kindly asked to be excellent to each other: https://fsfe.org/about/codeofconduct
