Is there some project that the opensource world is missing that you think it needs?
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Proper 3D CAD software, we have FreeCAD but it isn’t very good.
Open source language learning only has Anki. Everything else is in an enbryonic stage.
There are so many low hanging fruits. Add-on to look up words in subtitles and add it to Anki. Luo dingo clone that’s a bit less tedious (without having to write so much of your native language). Clozemaster clone (unless someone knows how to set up Anki to do this)
100% agree, would like to see more stuff in this space. Do you have any links to more “enbryonic tools”. I recall seeing another tool awhile ago that I tested (can’t remember the name) that worked a bit like LingQ. It would run a webserver and you could read links through it and mark words you didn’t understand. I couldn’t really get into a flow using it as tool to learn languages.
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.
So just sync over local wifi basically? I’m pretty sure you can do thing with syncthing if you just disable “global discovery”. You can read the local discovery protocol here https://docs.syncthing.net/specs/localdisco-v4.html but afaiu there is no cloud sync involved at that point and just device to device sync.
Perfect, it looks like the thing I want. Hopefully it can do multiple devices in different networks. I’ll test it out when I can.
Thank you :)
It’s awesome that more people are discovering new useful software through answering here!
No problem! I personally use syncthing to keep my password database synced between my phone, laptop, and desktop. As well as to keep some important files backed up between different devices that way if my hdd or something happens to one of the devices I have backup on the other ones.
Would you be able to trigger it using something like nfc actions, so you’d only have to swipe an nfc tag and it’d start copying automatically? In which case, a few cheap nfc stickers from china, throw them about the house / apt and then carry on with your life.
Probably? I just have it setup to always be running in the background on my devices. So if it detects a file change to my sync folder that gets sent to all other devices currently connected. I use global sync so as long as the device has an internet connection or is on the same local network it should be able to sync.
There is an API to interface with syncthing daemon running on your computer https://docs.syncthing.net/dev/rest.html so if you wrote a program to track the nfc action and interface with that API I think you probably could.
Ah well in that case it wouldn’t be needed because as soon as it’s in range of the local network would be easier than taking the trouble of using nfc!
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.
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.
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.
https://ladybird.org/ is pretty cool, tho it definitely needs more work
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.
DNS management. Think something like InfoBlox where I can have GUI driven control from simple adding a new zone record all the way up to full anycast configuration.
I love the terminal and CLIs to death but zone files suck and setting up bind or unbound/nsd is more painful than it should be.
I have a decent web UI based DNS (and other stuff) management if you’d like to give it a try.
I’m running Netbox as the main tool Coupled with the DNS plugin With a cron job running OctoDNS with octodns-netbox as data source, and zone transfer to my local Unbound server for resolution and cloudflare for public DNS.
It was a bit of work to setup but I didn’t have any issues with it so far.
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
Openly available traffic data that follows a reliable standard.
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
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.
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.
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
Tax software. It’s the only reason I keep a windows VM.
I considered an accounting SaaS once. Only once though. The amount of constantly changing regulations would make it a very high maintenance project.
And have you ever read the forms? I don’t know if writing the software could be seen as tax advice or filing on behalf of someone.
Probably not. But its enough that I wouldn’t be interested in working on the project.
And have you ever read the forms? I don’t know if writing the software could be seen as tax advice or filing on behalf of someone.
Who would use the software if it didn’t suggest ways to save them money, which would then take on the burden of actually being legally correct? UK tax accounts can be submitted directly to the government which requires an additional level of checks by them. Accounting is relatively simple to understand for UK accounting… until it isn’t. It becomes very complicated, very quickly, and that dramatically alters the database schema, alters workflows, and this stuff can be in a constant state of flux. Corporate accountancy laws are very different to personal tax accounting, and keeping abreast of both situations can be very difficult to manage.
I spoke to a person representing a fairly small commercial accounting SaaS who said they specifically only target high-net-worth companies who can afford to pay the prices they need to turn a profit, and that’s why they put on silly fake award shows (my words) for people within these companies (mostly c-suite people) to placate them into spending more money with them.
Doesn’t sound good now does it? No one will take that responsibility for free.
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
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
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
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
