Freedometer

From Freedom Dreams Wiki

Freedometer will tell you how free your system is, and help you improve it. It was inspired by this blog post.

[edit] Concept

There are two different modes of operation:

• If Freedometer is run on a mainly non-free platform such as Windows, or Mac OS X, it will scan for free software packages already installed, and act as a package manager to install new pieces of free software. It could also scan for the most common pieces of non-free software and offer alternatives for these. The freedometer will also recommend the Ubuntu distribution of GNU/Linux, and will help the user install and start using Ubuntu (ideally migrating settings). THe install would be remastered to include the GNU/Linux Freedometer by default.
• When Freedometer is run on GNU/Linux, or other free platforms, it will scan to see what non-free packages are installed. It will explain the problems with these pieces of software, and help install the alternatives. Based on the distro, it will also display a note about non-free firmware and other non-free software that will be installed, but lumped together with free software. Ultimately, it will recommend gNewSense as a full free operating system.

[edit] Software

Freedometer is still in a development state. The code I have written so far can be found at github. You can download the sources as a tar or zip, or from git:

git clone git://github.com/Bjwebb/freedometer.git

The code that I have written so far is in Python (version 2.5 required), and can currently detect the operating system it is being run on, and give some limited feedback based on this. It is only on debian based distros that it can scan packages (at the moment) - the included vrms 1.14 is used to do this.

[edit] Ideas

• In order to not annoy users, it must be possible to undo any action performed with freedometer.
• Freedometer could also replace, or integrate with, the firefox plugin install and restricted driver manager, in order to provide better explanations in these places.
• Freedometer could also scan media and document files, and offer advice on open document and media formats.
• Since the download/install prodcedure is different for different platforms, part of the freedometer could be a dynamic website which would tell the user, in vague terms, how free their system is using the User Agent information.