Is there some project that the opensource world is missing that you think it needs?
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Another good email client. Many are trying to leave Thunderbird on GNU Linux but there aren’t many to choose from.
Why? Thunderbird announced it is not adopting the Firefox EULA.
A self-hosted photo/video viewer which presents itself as an Open Directory that maps closely to the underlying file system and also includes the ability to view images and stream videos. If videos are too large/incompatible with the user’s browser, they should be transcoded on the fly (optionally with the gpu). Genuinely surprised something like this doesn’t exist
lists niche-specific list of requirements Genuinely surprised this doesn’t exist.
Most of what you want already exist in tons of simple php scripts that will take a directory and present each directory as a gallery. The live transcoding thing is something you can always add, because ya know, the majority of servers do not have GPUs.
Nothing and everything.
There are thousands if not millions of open source solutions scattered around society. Some are feature complete, most are not. Some are maintained, many are not. A handful are funded, the rest is not.
What open source needs, more than anything else is fundraising and the means to distribute those funds to the tune of the trillions of dollars that the corporate world extracts in profits from those open source efforts.
In other words, the people who make this need to get paid.
Firefox terms and conditions, Red Hat, and several other projects that have caused uproar through the community, are all caused by the need to get paid to eat food and have a roof over your head whilst you contribute to society and give away your efforts.
I 100% agree with this what we need is a centralized store like steam that is a non-profit. Where they make it easy just to buy the software. I love distros as much as the next person but having it centralized between all distros gets people paid. My only concern is how do we get the devs of libraries used by those apps use paid. And yes i know it sounds crazy it’s open source how can you charge? Nothing in free and open source says you have to not charge. You just have to given them the source when you do so.
Even if someone can build it themselves for free. If you make the store a great experience to use. People will just buy. It’s likely this i can go out and pirate any games I want. So from a monetary perspective it’s the same. With a little work I could have my games for free but steam is so good i just buy the game.
I know micropayments is a bad word, but a centralized nonprofit where I could pay 50$ a month to distribute amongst projects I use and their dependencies would be great. Disregarding any privacy concerns of course, as they would have to track all or most of the applications I use and for how long.
Liberapay might interest you. Not quite the same but maybe close enough
I know about that and use it for some projects, but it’s still the hassle of donating to individual projects and small payments have disproportionally higher fees (I’m not blaming them it just is like that)
Yeah the problem with that model is the overhead to pick who gets the money would cut in to much. My thought is you want it you buy it. They could do it like humble bundle and have a slider to pay more if you want.
Perhaps a model like itch.io offers. Each product can set a price or have a “pay what you want” model. I feel some would be more likely to give money if it’s right up front.
But the biggest part that I think we need, is a centralized location, store or not. Sometimes it’s hard to find if an open source alternative even exists because it could be on Github, Gitlab, Codeberg, etc.
Yeah alternativeto.net works for that but there is no direct pay and install
games! in maybe 95% of cases you can find an open alternative to some (non-game) software, but with games it’s the opposite.
i would say that the main proprietary softwares i still use, are video games
Disclaimer: I have no qualifications or really any business talking about this…
I think games aren’t the best kind of projects for open source. Some games are made open source after development ends which is cool because it opens up forks and modding (pixel dungeon did this). Most games require a single, unified, creative vision which is hard to get from an “anyone can help” contribution style. Most open source software are tools for doing specific things. It’s almost objective what needs to be done to improve the software while games are much more opinionated and fuzzy. So many times I’ve seen a game’s community rally behind a suggestion to address a problem and the developer ignores them and implements a better idea to more elegantly solve it. Most people aren’t game designers but they feel like they could be.
An exception to this are certain, rules-based puzzly games. Bit-Burner is an open source hacking game with relatively simple mechanics and it works well.
Open source doesn’t mean anyone can contribute
Sqlite is a good example of this. They explicitly say the project is open source but not open contribution.
Try Veloren and Anarch! Lots of fun to be had.
Intereating, this? Never heard of it before: https://drummyfish.itch.io/anarch
Yes. The author is a bit edgy, but it’s a cool and impressive game
Games have a very high barrier to entry though with many different parts, so that may be the reason?
StarCraft would not be so hard to make. But nobody did that, even though 0 AD exists to clone age of empires 2
It even works as a 2D game so no modeling experience necessary
A mesh network internet, it’s more of a hardware, security, and adoption problem but at this point there’s enough wifi overlap in most residential areas that entire towns could have their own local internet without needing the ISP model at all.
Berlin’s C-Base were working on mesh about fifteen years ago for Berlin - you could check out c-base.org
A. Phone.
Android is open-source, I thought.
Only Android Open Source Project, not the different phone UIs, vendor blobs, firmware, camera apps, etc… It is really the basics that are open source.
But also the source of android is 100% controlled by google unless it is an alternative forked project like lineageOS (at least I think so)
I run grapheneos since a couple of years and I love it.
android yes, but the entire google play ecosystem is not, and some things are very hard to do without being inside that ecosystem.
I’m using my fairphone without any google account (so no play store), and it works, but there are some obstacles. Luckily my bank still offers a good website and even uses some international standard for 2 factor auth, so i can do my ebanking without the app - which, like most companies, is only offered in the play store.
for public transport, i downloaded the app from apkpure (in hindsight, the aurora store would likely be the better option) and it works fine for buying tickets. this is just my lazyness, i could buy tickets on the website (but it sucks) or at ticket machines, but the app is super convenient.
for various other services i just refuse to install apps. parking payments, my insurance company, work (luckily i have a bunch of freedom at work, using linux on my work laptop too)… is all stuff that would be convenient but it’s all just available in play store. it looks like aurora is a good option, but 1. i don’t know how long until google kills it and 2. i want to completely stop being dependent on adtech anyway.
That’s not untrue but phones are complex, requiring lots of components and drivers to work together, so it’s hard to get a fully free phone.
If we started with a very basic, touch tone phone and worked from there it might be doable. Seems to me the hard part is breaking through the FCC/Cell company monopoly, so just focusing on how to contact a cell tower and make a voice phone call would be the key.
Fairphone comes pretty close.
@frightful_hobgoblin @0101100101
Very needed
The EU managed to get Meta on their knees with GDPR. They could force unlocked bootloader and easy install of any OS on phones just like on laptop/pc. I believe then we would really get the Linux phone movement going. Imagine: iPhone with UBports.
A project to give me money in exchange for me writing software.
Have you checked out NLNet?
It is an European Agency that funds you to write FOSS software based on a project/idea you submit to them
yeah denied lol
Liberapay
The post open project maybe?.One day perhaps.
A high performance RISC-V CPU core.
Jim Keller is now working on one. I kind of doubt it will be FOSS, though.
Yeah I have no hope for an American FOSS design.
Perhaps an EU-backed one might appear at some point.
Recently I stumbled upon a Chinese team working on a FOSS pair of cores, with source in GitHub. I think they were aiming at competing with A76 and N2. Supposedly they’re well underway.
If these guys (or any others) tape out a competitive FOSE chip, it’ll change the world. If it’s a decent project, everyone and their mother will fork it. And we’ll get chips that cost just a bit over the silicon and packaging cost.
Hear, Hear
Most anything related to healthcare:
- System for medics and nurses to input all the data of a patient, which can be accessed by said patient if need be
- System for keeping track of vaccines applied and pinging people who need to take more shots (second dose, reinforcement dose, etc)
- drivers and programs to interact with medical equipment
there’s actually a bunch of these, but healthcare tends to fall prey to “too much money, too many consultants, fancy brochures”
Healthcare normally have tight varying legal requirements that software must adhere to, so I would say there couldn’t be a single solution for multiple countries.
Gonna take a look at that one. Data migration from a 10+ years program would definitely be the second biggest pain, number one would be training staff to use it, but i do think it’d be worth it
Main problem with it is lack of certification, which prevents it’s use ironically in Germany, the country of origin. I would have loved to use it. If you live in a less–regulated health system, I wish you success!
Data migration will be a huge problem – medical management system companies tend to lock their customers into their system by preventing data migration.
I just didn’t bother with migration. I used an autohotkey script to print all patient charts of the old system into pdf files – unconvenient but failsave – and built the new data base from scratch.
In my case, it’d be an actual epic job, since I work for govt and we use an old version of TrakCare, which has been the source of a number of headaches for at least 7 years now
I’m curious, which certifications does it lack such that Germany can’t use GNUMed?
Billing the public health insurance. It’s perfectly usable for private practice, but there are only very few private only practices in Germany.
TrakCare – wow, intersystem offers a bunch of data management software in > 20 countries.
At first glance, TrakCare seems to be targeted at hospitals. GNUmed is targeted at small practices.
At the minute, a true open source and free browser/web engine, though I know this is nigh impossible to maintain without thousands of people. Some part of me is hopeful though given recent events.
They exist. Firefox and chromium are open source. Big companies pay their dev costs but they can be forked. Chromium is a descendent of WebKit which is a descendent of khtml from the KDE project. The engines have been open source for decades It’s the proprietary crap they put on top which is the problem.
https://ladybird.org/ is pretty cool, tho it definitely needs more work
A fitness tracker app that rivals Strava.
Try FitoTrack. I’ve been using it for awhile, measurements are very close to what Strava records. It does lack the social element though
Also can’t find anything good for Macros
Ooh that’s a great idea, maybe I should get on it 🤓
On iOS I’m using OutRun. It provides basic activity tracking, which is what I care about. I don’t need a social network.
It’s open source: https://github.com/timfraedrich/OutRun
A printer or printer firmware. There was a discussion about this elsewhere on lemmy, of course this would be difficult and expensive but it would be very cool
The biggest issue I see is that most of the tech is someone’s IP. If it’s not patented, it’s copyrighted or trademarked. Otherwise, it should be a doable PoC with old parts and a barebones firmware. I don’t need my FOSS printer to contend with Xerox, I just need it to poop out a page when I hit print.
I’d also love to see a FOSS page description language that could dethrone Adobe’s PostScript and HP’s PCL as the standards.
Some of the OLD HP Thinkjet printers were pretty rudimentary; the original Thinkjet cartridges are still widely manufactured for certain industrial applications. Tell me we couldn’t reprap that shit.
A reprap style project could probably make a passable document printer- but what’s the appeal? People only work on those projects to make new or previously unobtainable machines available.
I just don’t think it’d be worth the effort.
I think the appeal is to have some kind of paper printer that isn’t under the thumb of fucking megacorps.
for me the most critical ones are replacements for discord and microsoft teams. for discord the critical piece is the login - people don’t want to make accounts on each server, so until we have proper federation with a good user experience people won’t actually move off it.
for teams i’m sure theres projects in development, i just don’t know them or their status - all i know is that i want a project to combine several specialized FOSS services (jitsi is great, and there’s lots of other collaboration tools for email/calendar/chat) into one nice unified frontend that is actually reasonably easy to self-host and maintain.
Have you tried element?
The problem with Element as it compares to discord in my experience of showing it to discord-heavy users is that it does not contain the feature set that they are seeking.
Discords roles and permissions abilities, multiple channel types, streaming capabilities, public bots that are easily joinable, profile customization features, moderation capabilities, and more have no real equivalent in Matrix/element. Hence, when I have shown it to discord users before, they have 0 interest in using it because for them it is like reverting to an IRC.
This is part of what suggesting alternatives to Discord is hard. People tend to view it as one thing, often chat or voice/video, instead of a holistic solution that is all of those things and more along with making most tasks super easy to do for people.
Element’s still Electron-based for the desktop app, given Electron is Chromium and Google has the final say over Chromium, that doesn’t make it trustworthy at least in my opinion and I’m sure others’ opinions too.
I run it in Firefox, though
people don’t want to make accounts on each server, so until we have proper federation
I’ve shit on matrix a lot but this is something it does well.
Was about to point you to MatterMost but saw it’s not open source, doh! Anyone know if it was and switched? Or was it always closed source?
Edit: Turns out it was and still is open source, I just apparently suck at researching.
Mattermost does have an Github Repository with a choice of three licenses: MIT (if using versions compiled by them), AGPLv3 (if compiled by you) or an Enterprise license. I would count that as open source.
Oh awesome! I saw their website just describes them as “source accessible” and that github didn’t detect a license type and (wrongly) took that to mean it was an “open core but not really open source” product.
https://meet.jit.si/ was a contender during the covid era
It you’re looking for ideas-- Something you’re passionate about. Find a problem you’re having, fix it, and make it open source. That’s the best way to make sure whatever you do doesn’t get abandoned. Good luck
Sometimes you get into skill issue, or time issues. I make some softwares that I need, but I don’t have advertising skills to make people use it.
And sometimes I want to make something, but I don’t have the necessary skills.
For example I’d like a local filesharing option. Where a single folder would be synced in my phone from home computer when I’m at home, and from work computer and phone when I’m at work. Without using cloud sync between them only when I’m physically traveling between them, that’s good enough for most use cases of cloud sync that I want for work.
