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!
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:
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-e...
[1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/openvr
[2] https://github.com/OculusVR/RiftDK1
[1] https://www.highfidelity.io/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Fidelity_Inc
[3] http://venturebeat.com/2015/10/28/virtual-world-pioneer-phil...
Nope, sadly absolutely non-free. A blnice example how the term 'open-source' is ugly.
Outside of phones there is router hardware.
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.
Now, if we talk about mobile, there are only a few niche projects like Neo900 which might release extremely expensive, outdated and half free hardware.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.
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/ [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.
I know there is no open band 4G standard, and while WIMAX is close its only advertised for support on restricted radio bands, which is not good enough. But radio spectrum allocation already is an extremely fucked up mess that needs dissolved all on its own.
Regarding similar protocols, there really isn't anything. One of the lessons from the Bad Old Days is that not having a centralized registry is that you get frustrating conflicts and huge interoperability problems.
With radio spectrum allocation, it's fucked up for a number of reasons, and dissolving it would cause even more problems. Radio astronomy needs clear areas of bandwidth so they can look over the sky and analyze, emergency responders need the same so people can be directed quickly, local broadcasters need it so that people can actually broadcast. Cell phones need them so they can communicate with towers. Radio technology is /complicated/ and at higher frequencies, it only gets moreso. That's why devices need licensing -- if someone screws up the radio hardware/software, it can easily impact more than themselves. Abolishing any sort of spectrum allocation would only lead to a commons that would quickly degrade and send us right back to corded devices.
My larger point is that we have observed in the last twenty years that while signal congestion can be real, we can also now build radios sophisticated enough to deal with it much better than in the past. Things you cannot have interfered with like air traffic control and emergency broadcasts should absolutely be given their own channels, but technology has improved enough that we can certainly stymie their band allocations they are given today without compromising integrity assuming the use of more capable radios.
But even then, I'm not strongly arguing to do any of that - I think it is possible, but I also don't think its particularly necessary - we could simply de-privatize most of the sold off spectrum to private companies to be used for public communications and in the common interest. Think of the Internet bandwidth over air we could get if we had gigahertz of available channels between the 500 to 5000mhz bands.