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Stallman's Free Software Foundation says we need a free phone OS

The Free Software Foundation has published a new High Priority Projects list, the document it uses to highlight “a relatively small number of projects of great strategic importance to the goal of freedom for all computer users.” By publishing the list, the Foundation hopes to guide volunteers towards what it feels are the most …

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Monday 23rd January 2017 05:22 GMT Oh Homer

Yes we do, but it'll never happen

Android dominates for the same reason as Windows did before it, because it had a bucketload of cash spent on channel partners, marketing and infrastructure.

The bit where people write the actual software is easy, and really has zero impact on adoption, no matter how good it is. The fact of it being free (in either sense) is even less relevant.

Ultimately people use software and services because other people use that same software and services. It's a momentum thing, and getting that momentum going needs serious muscle, far beyond the FSF's philosophical musings (all of which I totally agree with, but then I'm not 99% of consumers, who really only care about results, not how they get them).

The best chance we have of seeing something that is both free (as in freedom) and popular would be if you applied the same collaborative principle to funding as the actual free software development, so a truly free software mobile initiative could pay for all those things beyond mere software development that are absolutely necessary for market dominance.

In other words we need crowdfunding. Sadly even most of those go titsup, because nobody ever hears about them (as even crowdfunding needs marketing - catch 22).

Nope, there's just no way around it. You need big fat wads of greasy cash to do pretty much anything.

32 3 Reply
1. Monday 23rd January 2017 06:48 GMT bazza
  
  Re: Yes we do, but it'll never happen
  
  Fully agree with all that.
  
  Looking back at the history of the PC, we have all benefited from the huge success of a proprietary OS running on an open hardware standard. DOS and Windows have always cost money, but they run on top of a hardware platform that is, even today, completely open to other OSes [secure boot can almost always be turned off]. The benefit is that there is a massive installed base of hardware which can run binaries for Linux, FreeBSD, etc easily, no complex recompiling needed, etc. Consequently these other OSes are accessible to ordinary users.
  
  There is nothing quite like that in the mobile world. I think before we can talk about a free mobile OS we need a popular free and nearly universal hardware standard for mobiles.
  
  The closest we've got to that is Microsoft's mobile phone hardware spec. Close, but no cigar. But if MS did offer a signing service and opened the spec, it would be possible for third parties to develop and deploy their own OS across a range of quite nice mobiles that all conform to more or less the same binary environment. That would make it easier for a free OS to come to the fore.
  
  Maybe it's something MS do just before the platform dies completely, at the point where they have nothing to lose by doing so.
  
  14 3 Reply
  1. Monday 23rd January 2017 08:21 GMT Ken Hagan
    
    Re: Yes we do, but it'll never happen
    
    @bazza: spot on...
    
    " I think before we can talk about a free mobile OS we need a popular free and nearly universal hardware standard for mobiles."
    
    This is the sticking point. Yes we have things like Ubuntu One and even Cyanogen Mod but it's not that easy to get it running on your phone and not everything will quite work once you do. Worse, in six months the handset guys will have a new offering and it will be another six months after *that* before this new shiny is supported by your favoured free OS.
    
    Apparently this suits the hardware vendors just fine, so I don't expect the situation to improve just because the FSF wants it too. RMS simply has no leverage with the people causing the problem. Even Canonical, who actually have the cash to bribe a handset maker into offering their OS, haven't made much impression and (at time of writing) have no phone offering.
    
    Look at the list of supported handsets for Cyanogen Mod. It's massive, all with varying degrees of "working" and (by implication) varying degrees of "supported by a competent developer if you, dear user, run into trouble.
    
    Look at the list of ARM-based PCs that you can hack Linux onto. There aren't so many, but they are all still differemt so you find that only some distros are supported and they are usually running an older kernel.
    
    Now look at the x86-based PC, where Linux really works. There's one hardware standard. The very latest software is available for download. Installation is trivial (even in a UEFI world) and you have thousands of support options.
    
    15 1 Reply
  2. Wednesday 25th January 2017 14:07 GMT Joe Burmeister
    
    Re: Yes we do, but it'll never happen
    
    > I think before we can talk about a free mobile OS we need a popular free and nearly universal hardware standard for mobiles.
    
    Abso-bloody-lutely. I've been saying this for a long time. But it's not just us FOSS people that need this. Google needs this. It gets shit for Android phones running old insecure versions of Android getting hacked/infected. WHICH IS CORRECT, IT IS THEIR FAULT. They should have mandated an auto discoverable platform and that for a phone to be called "Android" it needs to be able to have standard stock Android installable on it. The only way of doing that is auto discoverable hardware.
    
    The other thing is that there needs to be competition of phone OSs, including Windows Phone. For that, again, you really want standard auto discoverable hardware.
    
    Google don't care because they just blame the vendor for not updating the Android of the old phones. The vendors don't care because they say buy a new phone. Needless E-waste.
    
    This needs a big market to have some sensible regulator come and mandate this. The US or the EU would be the best placed. Pretty quickly that would be come THE standard.
    
    But this isn't just phones. It's basically the whole ARM platform. All these Internet Of Infected Things suffer from the same issue. So maybe ARM are to blame here too.
    
    I'm confident in the long run we will get there, it's just we have to go through all the stupid preventable problems first.
    
    1 0 Reply
2. Monday 23rd January 2017 06:52 GMT bazza
  
  Re: Yes we do, but it'll never happen
  
  Continued...
  
  But even if that were to happen, we'd come straight to your point about everything beyond the OS.
  
  Linux has the same problem; every year has been given year of the Linux desktop, but somehow it's never actually happened. OS X and Windows simply offer far more than a mere desktop environment.
  
  16 6 Reply
  1. Monday 23rd January 2017 09:32 GMT Lars
    
    Re: Yes we do, but it'll never happen
    
    "OS X and Windows simply offer far more than a mere desktop environment.". Not quite true. Hint, there are Apple shops. Jobs did "get it".
    
    1 9 Reply
  2. Monday 23rd January 2017 12:20 GMT kryptylomese
    
    Re: Yes we do, but it'll never happen
    
    It already is the year of the linux desktop. We use it where I work and so do google and lots of other companies and organisations. Where it has not "won" is with the majority of home users who tend to play games (not every game works on Linux yet).
    
    12 7 Reply
    1. Monday 23rd January 2017 18:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
      
      Re: Yes we do, but it'll never happen
      
      A highly usable, and pretty, desktop is a thing to behold and to avoid. While PCs are great for highly sophisticated games needing lots of weird input that a joystick only can't provide, and Macs can do lots of high-end desktop publishing stuff, music and other creative design works nothing can beat my $35 (+$15 for the 32GB storage mSD) Pixel on Raspberry Pi. What IS a desktop? What do you need it for? This low-cost solution can do any web browsing I need, mail and other general computing things; think store and edit pictures and docs, etc. I can run free IDEs for more sophisticated software and other editing needs, as well as make using GPIO ports very very simple. Even with Macs and PCs you need to buy some extra h/w to do general I/O that does not require USB, SATA, or other such "fat" ports. And the icing on the cake is that every Linux/Unix desktop can to "magical mouse focus" on windows, which seem like something from another world in the Mac/PC universe. Even the native Mac Terminal windows can't manage mouse-focus. It's a small thing, but it's still not addressed after all this time.
      
      Anyway, desktops, $35. Works for me.
      
      3 0 Reply
  3. Monday 23rd January 2017 13:31 GMT Oh Homer
    
    Re: "OS X and Windows simply offer far more"
    
    Not sure I'd go that far, especially where MacOS (and all things Apple) is concerned, which is founded entirely upon the vacuous "style over substance" ethos.
    
    As for Windows, there's no question that it has a yuuge ecosystem. The best kind of ecosystem.
    
    Sorry, couldn't resist.
    
    But seriously, if you carefully scrutinise the actual software in that huge ecosystem, what you discover is a vast load of crap, redundancy and just a tiny handful of genuinely good titles. When you stack all the best bits from each platform together, you get more or less the same numbers, despite the fact that the total size of each ecosystem is very different.
    
    Again, it isn't the actual software that makes the difference, it's the financial backing for everything else, like greasing the channel.
    
    Free Software doesn't need philosophers, it needs venture capitalists, and that my friend is a bit of a paradox (at least as far as the monopoly-oriented venture capitalists are concerned).
    
    5 3 Reply
    1. Monday 23rd January 2017 13:47 GMT IHateWearingATie
      
      Re: "OS X and Windows simply offer far more"
      
      "Free Software doesn't need philosophers, it needs venture capitalists, and that my friend is a bit of a paradox (at least as far as the monopoly-oriented venture capitalists are concerned)."
      
      A paradox in that venture capitalists want to make a return on the money they invest and the likelihood of making anything back on the money spent on a free mobile OS even if it were successful is pretty much nil?
      
      Free Software needs a generous sugardaddy, willing to spend loads and get nothing but the general feelings of love from the community in return. That's not going to happen.
      
      8 0 Reply
      1. Monday 23rd January 2017 14:11 GMT Doctor Syntax
        
        Re: "OS X and Windows simply offer far more"
        
        "Free Software needs a generous sugardaddy, willing to spend loads and get nothing but the general feelings of love from the community in return. That's not going to happen."
        
        Actually what free software needs is a route to making money other than from licensing it.
        
        That route actually does exist for general purpose Linux distros: it's adding value via support so the likes of Red Hat & Suse are able to support development in order to have a product that they can sell.
        
        The unfortunate thing as far as phones and tablets are concerned that isn't a workable option. The route chosen there seems to have been monetizing the users. It would have been better if it had been hardware vendors getting together to develop their own OS collaboratively as something to enable them to sell H/W. Unfortunately they gave in to the easier route of signing a contract which lets them have the OS in exchange for access to those users.
        
        7 0 Reply
      2. Monday 23rd January 2017 14:40 GMT Oh Homer
        
        Re: "generous sugardaddy"
        
        No, it needs someone who understands the difference between academic freedom and freeloading, that monopolisation is not somehow the inexorable foundation of commerce, and that academic collaboration is not antithetical to profit.
        
        4 0 Reply
        
        Monday 23rd January 2017 15:15 GMT Defiant
        
        Re: "generous sugardaddy"
        
        Still got to do as Google says which is why it has Google bloat inside
        
        4 0 Reply
3. Monday 23rd January 2017 07:53 GMT Planty
  
  Re: Yes we do, but it'll never happen
  
  What a tool. android is already opensource
  
  https://source.android.com
  
  https://source.android.com/source/licenses.html
  
  (Apache licence for android source, GPL for Linux kernel)
  
  3 31 Reply
  1. Monday 23rd January 2017 08:18 GMT MrT
    
    Re: Yes we do, but it'll never happen
    
    “key technical specifications sufficient to write free drivers for their hardware.”
    
    This used to kill things like Cyanogen being implemented - the OS is open, but the kernel-mode drivers are not. One example - the original HTC Desire was never able to run anything above Cyanogen 7 (IIRC) because the full set of hardware drivers were not available for anything higher. YMMV with different manufacturers, and things have improved across the intervening years, but it's still an issue.
    
    18 0 Reply
  2. Monday 23rd January 2017 14:20 GMT Oh Homer
    
    Re: "android is already opensource"
    
    And so is GNU, but sadly it doesn't actually do much without the Linux kernel (which in turn is encumbered with proprietary restrictions).
    
    Android has the same problem. The proprietary nature of hardware (and subsequently the drivers for that hardware) prevents it from being truly Free.
    
    Claiming that the solution is already Free is highly disingenuous, when the bit that's actually Free is only half the solution.
    
    5 1 Reply
  3. Monday 23rd January 2017 15:05 GMT Anonymous Coward
    
    Re: Yes we do, but it'll never happen
    
    "What a tool. android is already opensource"
    
    Android was open source. Now it's 50/50, unless you want pure AOSP, including messaging and e-mail apps from 2010.
    
    This is the failure of the Open Handset Alliance AFAIC, who sat idly by while Google replaced core open source Android apps (browser became Chrome, app launcher became Google Now Launcher, messaging Hangouts, corporate e-mail via Gmail app and so on).
    
    Now the original open source applications are so out of date if you want Android, you have to license from Google. It sucks, but Google played it well.
    
    8 1 Reply
    1. Monday 23rd January 2017 21:20 GMT philthane
      
      Re: Yes we do, but it'll never happen
      
      I have a Wiley Fox Storm phone that came with Cyanogen installed by the OEM. It's 'free enough' if not quite Stallman compliant. I use Fdroid as my preferred app store and don't use Google's Play. But then it's been the year of the Linux desktop for me since about 2000.
      
      Most users do not care a bit about software freedom, or understand any of the privacy and security issues that bother free software advocates, they go for the best hardware in their price range and just take the software they are 'given'.
      
      8 0 Reply
    2. Wednesday 25th January 2017 13:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
      
      Re: Yes we do, but it'll never happen
      
      "Android was open source. Now it's 50/50,"
      
      Android is and always will be 100 open source, licensed by the Apache "do whatever you want with it" license.
      
      You seem to have assumed Google would not only write an entire opensource operating system for free, and give it to the world, but also give you all their closed stuff too. That's not going to happen. Google are a business, they have shareholders to report to.
      
      You are more than welcome to your your own mail client, browser, app store infrastructure and so forth. Stop assuming everything should be free, be grateful for what you have.
      
      0 0 Reply
  4. Monday 23rd January 2017 19:27 GMT Herby
    
    Re: Yes we do, but it'll never happen
    
    Well, the biggest problem is what is at the other end of the wireless (cell phone) connection. Most network operators DON'T WANT an open source box banging on their hardware for whatever reason. It must follow a bunch of rules to work properly. The suppliers of the communication chips (Qualcomm, et al) aren't want to release the specifics of how their chips operate so getting an open source driver for them will probably prove difficult.
    
    Working with anything that involves something regulated (network/cell phone providers) probably needs to be regulated in some way as well, and free-wheeling software that is ripe for a spammer to pick up on and spew forth just won't make it out of the gate.
    
    Sorry, that is how it goes. Unfortunate, but that's life. All of this makes Android about as close as it gets.
    
    0 1 Reply
    1. Tuesday 24th January 2017 08:36 GMT fuzzie
      
      Re: Yes we do, but it'll never happen
      
      We had, and sometimes still have, the same issue with Wifi chipsets and drivers, but through various cunning schemes and firmware extraction kits we've mostly routed around it. Fortunately other things like oFono and OpenLTE already exist.
      
      0 0 Reply
Monday 23rd January 2017 05:40 GMT gobaskof

Fingers crossed

I hope they will succeed in a feasible phone operating system where others have failed, as android is getting more and more frustrating. Hopefully they will take the easy route of starting AOSP and building something from there. No it is not perfect or ideal but it would foster compatibility and it might actually get finished unlike GNU HURD.

Also a pity to see octave fall off the list. I know many people are moving over to numpy, but personally I still prefer Octave for data analysis over numpy.

7 1 Reply
1. Tuesday 24th January 2017 05:04 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Re: Fingers crossed
  
  If you want to do data analysis user R with the data.table library. ggplot for charts etc.
  
  0 0 Reply
Monday 23rd January 2017 06:47 GMT CheesyTheClown

Isn't he cute?

Stallman managed to make it into the news again. And here we thought he was finally gone.

1) You can make the best free phone OS but no one will use it

2) Every vendor will give it a try because ... well why not

3) Every vendor will stop supporting it within days of it being released

The consumer who defines the success of a platform or not doesn't give a shit about free. They want music, videos and games.

19 7 Reply
1. Monday 23rd January 2017 08:29 GMT Ken Hagan
  
  Re: Isn't he cute?
  
  "The consumer who defines the success of a platform or not doesn't give a shit about free. They want music, videos and games."
  
  They'll get those because the browser and media player are the two bits of FOSS that get the most lurve from developers.
  
  What they will also get is no annoying vendor-enhanced user experience, which I seem to recall provokes a "how do I switch this crap off and make it like my old phone" response from pretty much every end-user when they buy a new phone.
  
  They'll also get security patches for more than six months on the device that they now use for online banking and offline payments. Children may not care about that, and I'll grant that they make the most noise on the interwebs, but anyone old enough to actually earn their own money might be interested in not losing it.
  
  13 3 Reply
  1. Monday 23rd January 2017 12:38 GMT Doctor Syntax
    
    Re: Isn't he cute?
    
    "What they will also get is no annoying vendor-enhanced user experience"
    
    Sadly that's what they'll not get because this includes all the user-parasitising crap that the vendors see as making them the most money, therefore no vendor is going to sell such a product.
    
    5 0 Reply
Monday 23rd January 2017 06:48 GMT FrankAlphaXII

High Priority must translate into something like this in GNUspeak:

"Lets bitch about everyone else (while offering nothing constructive but whining), while restricting your freedoms in the name of freedom (stay away from those nasty permissive BSD licenses, use GPLv3 and be sure to sign your copyright over to FSF!), make something half baked and nearly unusable (Have you tried Gnash?), and then drop it off the list in a couple of years"

18 16 Reply
1. Monday 23rd January 2017 10:26 GMT Hans 1
  
  @FrankAlphaXII
  
  Have you forgotten that GNU provide the GNU tools, you know, all the userland stuff for Linux, available for many other UNIX's as well ?
  
  Gnash and GNU Classpath were useless, agreed, but so much more very, very, useful stuff came out of their brains - I think that deserves some RESPECT!
  
  If you are happy to have stuff run on your computer that you cannot trust, good for you, I am not!
  
  18 4 Reply
  1. Monday 23rd January 2017 10:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
    
    "Have you forgotten that GNU provide the GNU tools, you know, all the userland stuff for Linux, available for many other UNIX's as well ?"
    
    Quite, but we're not exactly talking about a rewrite of a decades old text editor or directory search tool here. The GNU Project has invariably sucked at building complex tech. Great at certain components, a swamp of stagnation and dead-on-arrival projects everywhere else. Even their compilers are struggling these days. That shouldn't surprise anyone given the GNU Project's objective isn't to produce valuable, worthwhile software, but to produce "free" software and force everyone else onto it.
    
    9 8 Reply
  2. Monday 23rd January 2017 13:52 GMT Displacement Activity
    
    "Have you forgotten that GNU provide the GNU tools, you know, all the userland stuff for Linux, available for many other UNIX's as well ?"
    
    Errr.... I'd be a lot more impressed if they hadn't taken a huge amount of *existing* free software, and rewritten it simply because they disgreed with the definition of 'free'.
    
    4 4 Reply
2. Tuesday 24th January 2017 17:24 GMT Carney3
  
  It's not FSF's fault that Gnash is limited at best. Adobe's absurdly draconian licensing requirements in effect created a requirement that the only people legally permitted to do Gnash development were people who had NEVER used Flash, ever. In any browser, on any PC or device they had ever used. That made it almost impossible to find Gnash developers.
  
  1 0 Reply
Monday 23rd January 2017 06:51 GMT Anonymous Coward

srsly?

"...we need a free phone MCU firmware."

FTFY.

A phone ~~does not need~~ has never needed an OS. That'll be two cents, please.

7 7 Reply
1. Monday 23rd January 2017 06:52 GMT FrankAlphaXII
  
  Re: srsly?
  
  Wouldn't that be 25 cents?
  
  0 0 Reply
  1. Monday 23rd January 2017 09:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
    
    Re: srsly?
    
    Good question... I still plan on having a mobile, though. So far it's just a MC8777V with a SIM holder and a couple headphone jacks soldered on, because of (admittedly FSF-like?) production delays and distractions. Anyway if that 3G modem's firmware or my own derpy dialer counts as an OS, then I stand corrected.
    
    0 1 Reply
2. Monday 23rd January 2017 13:17 GMT khjohansen
  
  Re: srsly?
  
  You and I may differ in what makes an OS ...
  
  But I like to be able to keep a "contacts" list, to be able to answer a (missed) call with a TXT (or email, even!)
  
  - mine's the one with the ham radio in the pocket(s)
  
  0 0 Reply
  1. Monday 23rd January 2017 18:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
    
    Re: srsly?
    
    Contacts and texts are a given-- easily stored in EEPROM, but emails are for keyboards. The other day I proved to myself for like the twelfth time that "briefly" replying to an email on a touchscreen-- because my delightful phone had already buzzed me about it-- was its very own punishment.
    
    The reason I even *have* such a phondleslab is my roommate donated it to me, and the only reason I *needed* any is because somebody took the Nokia 6030 out of my pocket after they put me in a coma. I sorta miss it because it was simpler-- my phone was a phone and my camera was a camera and my MP3 player was an MP3 player and my computer was a computer. Also I had 2x 17670 LiIon cells glued onto the sides and soldered in parallel so it would go for a week between charges. It's probably at the bottom of Wolf Creek now. Net10 tells me the IMEI was 104257237361304, will you holler if it turns up on the brown market? (you know, the one where all they sell is crap)
    
    0 0 Reply
Monday 23rd January 2017 07:20 GMT Anonymous Coward

Basically their wish list is "copy what's hot today"

You can tell by looking at what projects they've dropped off their list - stuff that used to be hot but no longer is.

When the personal assistant hype dies down that will drop off their radar and they'll announce a need to implement freeware VR.

17 2 Reply
1. Monday 23rd January 2017 08:52 GMT AMBxx
  
  Re: Basically their wish list is "copy what's hot today"
  
  Can anyone out there list this guy's previous successes?
  
  0 9 Reply
  1. Monday 23rd January 2017 09:30 GMT wolfetone
    
    Re: Basically their wish list is "copy what's hot today"
    
    GNU wouldn't have to go far.
    
    7 0 Reply
  2. Tuesday 24th January 2017 21:45 GMT anonymous boring coward
    
    Re: Basically their wish list is "copy what's hot today"
    
    "Can anyone out there list this guy's previous successes?"
    
    Stallman's?
    
    It's a bit much to list.. It's called GNU/Linux for a reason. Do some research.
    
    1 1 Reply
Monday 23rd January 2017 08:58 GMT Anonymous Coward

I'd be happy if there was a phone OS that was updated for a reasonable length of time for the model, say five years, and it didn't spy on me.

I buy trousers that doesn't rifle the contents of my pockets and report it back to the mother ship, Stallman has a good point but at other commenters have said, it will never happen.

12 1 Reply
1. Monday 23rd January 2017 11:41 GMT wheelybird
  
  Like the Jolla phone?
  
  Though of course, good luck finding one to buy these days.
  
  2 0 Reply
2. Monday 23rd January 2017 16:30 GMT Lomax
  
  It already *did* happen; it's called Sailfish OS. And no, you don't need a Jolla handset to install it: https://www.androidpit.com/if-i-left-android-id-go-to-sailfish-os
  
  2 0 Reply
Monday 23rd January 2017 09:18 GMT Mage

Free PA

No.

Why should a "free" OS copy every stupid feature of the closed ones?

5 0 Reply
Monday 23rd January 2017 10:09 GMT Tom 7

Nope dont want a phone OS

Just want a phone that is potentially an optional peripheral in my chosen OS.

4 1 Reply
Monday 23rd January 2017 10:16 GMT HmmmYes

The DOS/Windows parallel dont fly.

Phones have too much personal data on them and are connected to 3rd parties. I find the lack of control on a smart phone pretty uncomfortable - I just dont know its doing.

ME? I stick to feature phones - text + talk. And use it as a bluetooth modem.

6 0 Reply
Monday 23rd January 2017 10:17 GMT HmmmYes

Oh oh - Can I say:

WIll it run HURD?

4 0 Reply
Monday 23rd January 2017 10:27 GMT Anonymous Coward

A free Siri/Cortana/Alexa clone,

This will fail for the same reason the Google Earth clone failed, the sheer power required to run it.

These are not, "oh lets put 10,000 possible queries into a server. and that's done".

Lets take a basic query

"Hi, where is the nearest petrol station"

Voice:

So first up it needs to understand what you have just said, No easy task in itself.

Location Data for person requesting:

It needs to know where you are now, right now, not 3 weeks ago.

Location Data for requested service.

It needs to know about every petrol station, in every country. Updated constantly.

Computing

Basic bit, but it needs to know that the nearest one open at 3am is not the one you are closest to. Oh and you're on a motorway, so the closest, open at 3am may not the closest to you, but the closest by road.

"Now remind me to get the milk from Sainsburys on my way home."

8 0 Reply
1. Monday 23rd January 2017 10:38 GMT Steve K
  
  Re: A free Siri/Cortana/Alexa clone,
  
  Agreed - Alexa etc. are about personalisation via a large data slurp to achieve this kind of secondary functionality (and of course other tracking data for the primary advertising purposes)
  
  If you don't like it then you are free to avoid using these services BUT I don't see how a FSF model (for those who don't want to use the commercial services) can offer this kind of service without some kind of data slurping of its own - and of course the associated storage and processing for these complex queries.
  
  Unless they mean something like Alexa that people host themselves purely for their own use?
  
  3 0 Reply
2. Monday 23rd January 2017 11:01 GMT tiggity
  
  Re: A free Siri/Cortana/Alexa clone,
  
  It will fail because it's a gimicky toy, those that desperately love (digital) personal assistants a lot are not very likely to want to / be able to develop one. Those capable of developing one will have better things to do with their time.
  
  8 0 Reply

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