tobias_platen's blog

This is part II of the I Love Free Software Day blogpost. More specifially it is about the game Veloren which I played once three years ago, when the pandemic was still ongoing. My computer that I had at time did not have a good GPU, so I used my brothers old computer with an NVIDIA card. A few years I got into VR which is only possible in freedom thanks to the libsurvive project. To be able to play VR games I baught an AMD graphics card, before that I used my Talos II’s built-in ASpeed graphics. With the new GPU I can drive up to 4 monitors. All the games that I run on my Talos II are free software:

VRChat is popular in the Transgender 🏳️‍⚧️ community, but I avoid it since it is non-free. V-Sekai is one of the free software replacements. While we need binaries to run a program on a computer, we also need source code for a program to qualify as free software. I am using part of the V-Sekai code in my BeatSaber clone called BeepSaber as I want full body tracking controlling an animated VRM avatar. While I usually present masculine as an enby 🖤💜🤍💛 (I never wear a beard), my VRM avatar will be female ♀️. For me that is a way to try out genders different from my gender assigned at birth.

There is another free software VR game that I would like to play. It is called VoxelWorksQuest and its author is the same person that wrote BeepSaber. Unfortunately it is unmaintained, so I decided to replace it with with a VR port of minetest (now called luanti). Minetest is similar to Minecraft and Veloren, but it is both free software and able to run on old computers with built-in freedom respecting GPUs. Luanti is also written in a programming language called lua, which I use at work a lot. In the next few weeks I will be continuing to work on Minetest XR adding missing important features to make the game playable.

Next month I will go to the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage where I also expect to meet many queers 🏳️‍🌈. There is also a “Gaming Night” 🎮 and many interesting talks, including one about KiCad (the tool that I use for building my own hardware), BTRFS (my preferred filesystem), Banking apps (unfortunately not GNU Taler) and Passkeys (allowing passwordless login). In the meantime I will watch recorded videos from FOSDEM, starting with “Declarative and Minimalistic Computing” then moving to “Open Hardware and CAD/CAM”.

Yesterday I contributed to the Free Software Directory, unfortunately I did not have enough time to write my intended blog post. So I am doing that now. #ilovefs
Free Software is a matter of freedom, not price. A program is free software if the program’s users have the four essential freedoms:

🖤 The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
💜 The freedom to study how the program works and to make changes (freedom 1).
🤍 The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
💛 The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3).

I have been developing free software both professionally and as a hobby for long times. Recently I came out as genderqueer (also known as non-binary) at the first
meeting of a GNU/Linux user group I cofounded. On the weekend before I was at FOSDEM where I met many trans and non-binary individuals, some of them at the Guix Days fringe event.

I also have used software written by trans and non-binary contributors. This includes the FPGA toolchain based on yosys and nextpnr, GNU MediaGoblin, SlimeVR and Monado to just name a few. For an upcoming hardware project (A Lighthouse tracked VR headset with RYF in mind), I will be using an ICE40 FPGA. For GNU MediaGoblin, I plan to setup my own instance again. I spefifically backed SlimeVR because the software is portable and can be used on a Freedom RespectingTalos II. When I saw the BLÅHAJ in the SlimeVR video I immediately recognized it is part of the Transgender culture. I also saw more than one BLÅHAJ at FOSDEM. Finally there is Monado, where one of the lead developers and some other contributors do identify as non-binary and/or transgender. Many of those persons were not out when I started using the software. Over the time, I realized that I am trans too, more specifically non-binary.

Part II of the blog post will be done tomorrow.

This weekend I visited FOSDEM and the Guix Days in Brussels. On Thursday I went to the Guix Days, a FOSDEM Fringe event. There I met many GNU Guix and Spritely Goblins contributors. I have been using the Guix System for many years, and I have plans to run Guix on smartphones. Spritely Goblins looks as interesting as GNUnet and Taler for me, but I did hot have a deeper look yet. From my eduction in computer science, I know both distributed systems and actor models. Goblins can be used with both Guile and Racket. I prefere the Guile variant, since I already know Guile from Guix. We discussed why “guix pull” is so slow. I also had proposed a talk about Guix System on Alternative target architectures (ARM, RISCV, POWER etc.) including smartphones and my Talos II workstation, currently running Debian GNU/Linux. My second proposal was about Virtual Reality. Unfortunately both poposals have been rejected as there were too many good talks.

On Saturday, the first Day of FOSDEM, I was in the Android Open Source Project and FOSS on Mobile Devices devrooms. There were many interesting talks including “Forking Android considered harmful” and “Towards a purely open AOSP: Adding Android-like functionality to AOSP”. On the second half of the day I went to the “FOSS on Mobile Devices” devroom, where I met Caleb Connolly who works on Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 Mainline Linux. I also met them at the last FrOSCon where I presented my port of Minetest to the LibreM5, a smartphone running GNU/Linux. The first talk in the FOSS on Mobile Devices devroom was “Mainline vs libhybris: Technicalities, down to the buffer”, I also watched most others. I have used libhybris once, as part of Droidian running on my OnePlus 6T, a SDM845 phone. Due to bugs I switched back to Android, later I found out that my phone was not supported by Droidian anymore. By contrast, Mobian uses the Mainline Kernel and does not use Android drivers.

On Sunday I started in the JavaScript devroom, then moved to the “Declarative & Minimalistic Computing” devroom, where I met many of the those who I saw at Guix Days, on the days before FOSDEM. First I listened to the “Minimalist web application deployment with Scheme” talk, then I ate my second a vegan burger at FOSDEM(the first one one was at Saturday). Unfortunately most of the food offered at FOSDEM is still not vegan. Next I went to the Luanti and FOSS on Mobile Devices booths in the K building and talked with the developers about some of the projects that I am currently working on. After that I went back from where I came from to listen to the “The Whippet Embeddable Garbage Collection Library” talk before the most interesting talks about the GNU Shepherd and Spritely Goblins started. Unfortunately I missed the talks from Jessica Tallon and Christine Lemmer-Webber, as I went to the Robotics and Simulation devroom where I had two interesting talks about the “Open 3D Engine” and the “Valve’s Lighthouse 2.0 Technology”. While I prefer Godot for VR, I still liked both talks. I am also working on my VR headset using the “Lighthouse positioning deck” from Bitcraze and a postmarketOS compatible smartphone, currently running both Android and Mobian.

After those two talks I went to the Keynotes at Janson (the big room). Both “The Growing Body of Proprietary Infrastructure for FOSS Development: Repeating Bad History” and “How we are defending Software Freedom against Apple at the EU’s highest court” were pretty interesting talks from Free Software activists who I fully support. Finally I went to room near Jansen where people were working on Virtual Reality (VR). I did not know about Overte e.V. and their Social VR projects yet. I told one of the developers that I use components of V-Sekai in my BeatSaber clone. V-Sekai is more or less a clone of the non-free VRChat game, one of those games that are popular in the transgender community. I am nonbinary and trans myself, and met many other queers at both FOSDEM and Guix Days. Not fully out yet, I enjoy social VR where I can try out a feminine avatar, while presenting mostly masculine in real life. At FOSDEM I wore a skirt and a dress, makeup and cat ears. Next month I’ll plan to go to the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage conference.