The inventor has about 134 patents [1] and many of which seem (to me) very generic. I am not very familiar with patent jargon so I can't definitively say if those patents have enough substance to them. Maybe someone with experience could expand on this?
I agree. I think they used the term 'open source' in reference to the freedoms that open source licenses often afford. I'm sure RMS doesn't like the inclusion of this sentence.
> The rules of open source were first introduced by computer scientists in the GNU Manifesto and lead to development of the General Public Licence (GPL) and Creative Commons Licence, which are often used instead of copyright.
From their unordered list of items on the technical roadmap they include the following.
- Make it safer for passengers and drivers
- Add drivers/passengers rating
- Make it easier to use and safer for moms/dads and children
- Make it easier to use for people with disabilities
Who knows if they'll do those things. They seem to be aware of some of the challenges. In regards to #2 they are probably planning on relying on donations in the short term.
Same here. I'll gladly downgrade some specs if it means I can run all free software on my phone. Trying to get google off of an unlocked android phone is still an uphill battle. Root access out of the box means I can install the software I want and remove software I don't (a novel idea).
The Purism team has accomplished an impressive feat with the Librem 5. Porting GNU/Linux onto a smart phone is a huge win for free software. I hope the transparency and upstream patches continue long in the future.
> It seems like you are recommending teaching something which is entirely different to what the vast majority of learners will come into contact with on a regular basis in their future lives. That is not useful and it does not prepare people for the real world.
Many free software replacements for proprietary software are quite similar to the locked down alternatives. Maybe if people learned a different program in school then they would continue to use it in their future lives. That would increase the number of users and the chances that other people would encounter it in the real world.
Proprietary software encourages dependence on a single company and discourages learning, the primary goal of an education institution. Realistically it is near impossible to live today without encountering proprietary software, but educational institutions should be more responsible about how they frame students' relationships with it.
> In the United States, it is the done thing to file taxes through a proprietary software portal (as the result of extensive lobbying). [Yes, this state of affairs is a travesty] Should schools, therefore, avoid teaching people how to file taxes?
Areas where centralization and high levels of security are important such as tax filing, flight booking, and online banking will likely use proprietary software for the foreseeable future. Rather than taking the strict stance that these activities must not occur on school grounds they should teach students how to protect themselves from potential harms of proprietary software (e.g. by running programs in isolated environments).
> Areas where centralization and high levels of security are important such as tax filing, flight booking, and online banking will likely use proprietary software for the foreseeable future.
Financial institutions, and government institutions, etc. will mostly be using proprietary operating systems for exactly this reason. By not teaching how they work (to a novice/intermediate level, not kernel specifics!) you preclude your students from taking most roles in such organisations. I'm not saying it's good that public services rely on private business, but it is naive to ignore it.
Another class of instruments that has evolved in all of the ways you named is the synthesizer. Certainly vocal performance is a very old tradition but to write off synth vocals as superficial is in my opinion throwing the baby out with the bath water. Sound synthesis has gone from an experimental and avant-garde playground to one of the most expressive and versatile fields of music composition.
Techniques like additive, FM, and physical modeling synthesis have opened up whole new worlds of musical possibilities to explore. The combination of synths with vocals only widens the expressivity, range, color, and ultimately individualism that voice alone can accomplish. For every autotuned vocal track in bad taste there are just as many creative uses of vocoders, talk boxes, filters and samplers that enhance creative expression.
> If I hear one more person who comes up to me and complains about "computer music has no soul" then I will go furious, you know. 'Cause of course the computer is just a tool. And if there is no soul in computer music then it's because nobody put it there and that's not the computer's role. It's the role of the songwriter. He puts down his soul in the song if he wants to. A guitar will never write a song and a computer will never write a song. These are just tools.
